iONE: An environment for experimentally assessing in-operation network planning algorithms

Huge amount of algorithmic research is being done in the field of optical networks, including Routing and Spectrum Allocation (RSA), elastic operations, spectrum defragmentation, and other re-optimization algorithms. Frequently, those algorithms are developed and executed on simulated environments, where many assumptions are done about network control and management issues. Those issues are relevant, since they might prevent algorithms to be deployed in real scenarios. To completely validate network-related algorithms, we developed an extensible control and management plane test-bed, named as iONE, for single layer and multilayer flexgrid-based optical networks. iONE is based on the Applications-Based Network Operations (ABNO) architecture currently under standardization by the IETF. iONE enables deploying and assessing the designed algorithms by defining workflows. This paper presents the iONE test-bed architecture, describes its components, and experimentally demonstrates its operation with a specific use-case.