Enhancing open flow to enable multilayer networking

The convergence of packet and circuit networks offers significant advantages, in terms of cost, energy efficiency and network performance. So there have been many attempts to unify the control and management of these networks. Optical Software Defined Networks is revealing new opportunities and challenges for optical equipments vendors and service providers inspired by recent developments in Software Defined Networking. Extending Open Flow to the optical (transport) layer will enable open programmability and pave the way to multidomain and multilayer network integration, which is driven by convergence of packet and optical technologies. In this paper we propose a simple way to unify both types of network using Open Flow. We exploit the fact that Open Flow provides a common API to the underlying hardware, and allows all of the routing, control and management to be defined in software outside the datapath.