Deployment of an SDN-based GPON control agent to manage network configurations

Abstract

The current wide deployment of PON (Passive Optical Network) technologies implies that there is a wide variety of PON devices causing incompatibility problems when configuring and controlling them simultaneously. Although these devices follow the same standards, each vendor can integrate its own implementations, so there are no fully universal PON devices. SDN (Software Defined Networking) is a technology for dealing with these problem, since equipment from different vendors can be controlled simultaneously, as SDN separates the control layer from the data layer. This paper proposes the development of an SDN agent based on the OpenFlow protocol to enable and facilitate the management of PONs, as well as being compatible with legacy PONs. In fact, this SDN agent allows to translate the OpenFlow commands sent by the SDN controller into the native language of PON devices. The proposal has been experimentally tested on a commercial GPON, successfully emulating emulating the configuration of real-time Internet services from a centralised SDN controller.