Elastic optical networking (EON), with its flexible use of the optical spectrum, is a promising solution for future metro/core optical networking. For the deployment of EON in a real-operational scenario, the dynamic lightpath restoration, driven by an intelligent control plane, is a necessary network function. Dynamic restoration can restore network services automatically and, thus, greatly reduce the operational cost, compared with traditional manual or semistatic lightpath restoration strategies enabled by network operators via a network management system.
To this end, in this paper, we present an OpenFlow-enabled dynamic lightpath restoration in elastic optical networks, detailing the restoration framework and algorithm, the failure isolation mechanism, and the proposed OpenFlow protocol extensions. We quantitatively present the restoration performance via control plane experimental tests on the Global Environment for Network Innovations testbed.