Design And Implementation Of A Lightweight, Large Scale Control Plane Simulator For Intelligent Optical Network

Intelligent Optical Network (ION) is the development trend of optical networks,this kind of new optical network can automatic exchange, transmist, connect and so on. ION adds a conception of intelligent Control Plane into conventional optical transport network. Through the introduction of control plane, flexible control of optical transport layer can be realized; the intelligence for network configuration and management is enabled; end to end light path can be established, deleted and modified flexibly according to the customers'request. Control Plane is the core of ION. The implementation of Control Plane is mainly depends on the Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) protocol and Management Information Base (MIB).The development of ION urgently needs a large-scale, true and reliable platform for its study as protocol researchers hope to evaluate the performance of communication protocols or control protocol; network researchers hope to be able to evaluate the new routing algorithms and network design plan under a more realistic network environment; network operators want to conduct a comprehensive assessment to network to ensure network's stability and reliability, further to guide network planning according to the result of network performance analysis. The establishment of a large-scale real test bed requires a lot of human, material and other resources due to the complexity, heterogeneity of ION. Furthermore, the experimental result cannot be reproduced in real test-bed. At the same time, the ION research mainly focused on research on the Control Plane as it is the core and manifestation of intelligence of ION. Therefore, the research on ION is mainly achieved through the simulation or emulation of ION Control Plane. However, the existing simulation or simulation tools do not have the feature of lightweight, high-fidelity and so on. Based on this situation, we re-designed and implemented a lightweight ION Control Plane simulator so as to provide a lightweight, highly reliable simulation tools for ION research .In this paper, we first discussed the design requirements of simulator and decided to adopt the concept of discrete event-driven and modular design. Second, we presented the overall structure of the software and gave the functional definition of each functional module and the communication method between the various modules. In the design process, by fully taking future extension into account, we define a series of clear communication interface. These interfaces using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as its communication protocol, and the message parameters were defined by Management Information Base (MIB), which makes it easy to use as these friendly external interfaces. Third, we detailed discussed the design and implementation of the node in Control Plane. To support future extension, the node composed of two modules: protocol control module and management module. The function of protocol control module is to simulate GMPLS protocol, while the management module is responsible for managing the information of node, link and traffic and so on. It is worth to mention that the management module is achieved by IETF standard MIB, which makes the simulator high fidelity. We appropriately simplified GMPLS protocol but completely retain its core logic so as to save a lot of memory resources and to accelerate the simulation process. Later, on the basis of the detailed analysis the inner association of the MIBs, we give its macro-structure and integrated implementations. At last, we verify the function of the control plane simulator and compare and analyze the performance of our simulator with commercial GMPLS Control Plane; the results show that the simulator is lightweight and high-fidelity.