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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 32, NO. 4, FEBRUARY 15, 2014

SDN and OpenFlow for Dynamic Flex-Grid Optical

Access and Aggregation Networks
Neda Cvijetic, Akihiro Tanaka, Philip N. Ji, Karthik Sethuraman, Shuji Murakami, and Ting Wang

AbstractWe propose and discuss the extension of software-defined networking (SDN) and OpenFlow principles to optical access/
aggregation networks for dynamic flex-grid wavelength circuit creation. The first experimental demonstration of an OpenFlow1.0based flex-grid -flow architecture for dynamic 150 Mb/s per-cell
4 G Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)
mobile backhaul (MBH) overlays onto 10 Gb/s passive optical networks (PON) without optical network unit (ONU)-side optical filtering, amplification, or coherent detection, over 20 km standard
single mode fiber (SSMF) with a 1:64 passive split is also detailed.
The proposed approach can be attractive for monetizing optical access/aggregation networks via on-demand support for high-speed,
low latency, high quality of service (QoS) applications over legacy
fiber infrastructure.
Index TermsDynamic circuit, flexible grid, mobile backhaul,
OpenFlow, optical access, passive optical networks (PON), software defined networking (SDN).

I. INTRODUCTION

ITH the rise of highly-dynamic traffic patterns and

cloud-centric, big data paradigms in modern networks, on-demand bandwidth provisioning capabilities rather
than aggregate transmission capacity gains are emerging as
crucial for revenue generation. In optical access networks,
on-demand provisioning of low-latency wavelength flows for
per-cell mobile backhaul
high quality of service
(MBH) over legacy passive optical networks (PON) is rapidly
becoming a vital technical and economic priority [1], [2].
However, notable spectrum fragmentation and gridlock exist in
legacy PONs due to the concatenation of fixed operational and
spectral guardbands that are disproportionately large compared
to service data rates: 20 nm for 1 Gb/s PON, for example
[3]. Localized differences in traffic demands also complicate
partitioning of the remaining spectral space into a universal
physical plan. While optical network unit (ONU)-side optical
tunability and large upstream spectral
filters with limited
band specifications accommodating tunable ONU-side laser
drift seek to alleviate this gridlock [4], further spectrum fragmentation limiting MBH overlays remains a challenge.
Manuscript received June 07, 2013; revised July 16, 2013; accepted July 20,
2013. Date of publication July 30, 2013; date of current version January 06,
2014.
N. Cvijetic, A. Tanaka, P. N. Ji and T. Wang are with NEC Laboratories
America Inc., Princeton NJ 08540 USA (e-mail: neda@nec-labs.com).
S. Murakami and K. Sethuraman are with NEC Corp. of America, Herndon,
VA 20171 USA (e-mail: Shuji.Murakami@necam.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2013.2274991

With the software defined networking (SDN) approach, however, instead of defining a fixed physical plan, software-reconfigurable flex-grid (or grid-less) planning can be introduced at the optical line terminal (OLT), by which a centralized controller with a global view of the -space can compute
customized provisioning metrics on-demand, and communicate
them using a generic OpenFlow-based [5] application programming interface (API). The OpenFlow-based API can then both
provide external interoperability and flexible, dynamic per-PON
physical plans. At the OLT, the -space virtualization can be
supported by widely-tunable DFB lasers, for which C-band cost
points nearly equal those of fixed lasers. For the upstream,
flexible-grid filters, i.e., wavelength selective switches (WSS),
can be software-controlled to track upstream signals and relax
ONU-side tunable laser requirements while reducing spectral
band size. Moreover, at the downstream ONU side, direct photodetection with digital signal processing (DSP)-based subOrthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)based signal separation can be used for OFDMA MBH/10 G
OOK PON coexistence without tunable optical filtering.
In this paper, we elaborate on the results of [6], in which
we proposed and experimentally demonstrated the first software-defined OpenFlow1.0-based flex-grid -flow architecture
for 150 Mb/s per-cell OFDMA MBH overlays onto PONs
comprising bidirectional 10 Gb/s OOK channels. By extending
OpenFlow 1.0 to control OLT-side tunable lasers, dynamic
layer 0 (i.e., layer) flows were created, enabling simultaneous
downstream OFDMA and OOK transmission at software-variable flex-grid spacing of 41.25 GHz to 141.25 GHz between
the two channels. Both signals were directly photodetected
without receiver-side optical filtering, amplification, or coherent detection over 20 km SSMF and 1:64 passive split.
In the upstream, OpenFlow 1.0 was extended to control not
tunable lasers but an OLT-side flex-grid WSS, creating a software-tunable passband for spectrally-efficient management of
ONU-side laser wavelength drift. In this way, wavelengths are
made available on-demand in an interoperable way without
requiring a common physical wavelength plan. This in turn
can be attractive for future optical networks that might require
convergence of fixed and mobile access and/or support for
arbitrary emerging applications that require dynamic optical
layer 0 (L0) circuit overlays. (We note that since L1 typically
refers to the SONET/SDH/ODU network layer, L0 is used to
refer directly to the underlying optical wavelength layer.)
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
In Section II, general SDN and OpenFlow concepts are
overviewed and discussed in Section III for optical networks,
particularly flexible-grid optical access/aggregation. The pro-

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CVIJETIC et al.: SDN AND OPENFLOW FOR DYNAMIC FLEX-GRID OPTICAL ACCESS

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posed software-defined -flow architecture for OpenFlow-enabled flex-grid wavelength overlays over PON is introduced
in Section IV, while the experimental setup and results are
presented in Section V. Section VI concludes the paper.
II. SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING (SDN) AND OPENFLOW
Arguably the single most important idea in SDN, or its most
concise definition, is the separation of the network control and
data planes [7], [8]. SDN origins are credited to [7], which
initially targeted improving security in Ethernet-based enterprise networks. Specifically, in was noted in [7] that because
source-to-address and address-to-principle bindings are loose
and insecure in todays networks, policy declarations need to be
made over low-level identifiers that dont have clear mappings
to network principles and are topology dependent. Such hardwiring of topology into security policy then inevitably requires
manual intervention, which complicates network operation,
slows down network evolution, and does not fully address security loopholes (e.g., the loose binding of arriving packets with
their source origin.) For example, rather than binding packets
to a network element with a unique name (e.g., neda_pc),
if they are bound to a lower-level identifier (e.g., IP address
in a topology-dependent subnet), the identifier changes as the
device moves around and packet tracing becomes increasingly
difficult. The key innovation in [7] was to overcome these
limitations by separating the control and data planes, adopting
a higher-level namespace, and exploiting a logically-centralized, all-powerful controller to determine security policy and
communicate it to generic forwarding hardware in terms of language rather than topology-specific encoding. This approach
enables the controller to readily customize security policy on a
per-flow, per-element basis independently of host location and
physical network topology. In short, this enables the highly
powerful feature of tight and tracked binding between names,
addresses and physical ports, even as devices change and move
around.
Another key observation made in [7] is that enterprise security is, in fact, a subset of network management: both require
a service-oriented network policy, the ability to control connectivity in an automated yet location and host-aware way, and
a means to observe and/or engineer the network traffic. This
relationship enables the direct application of SDN principles
to network management to optimize the mapping between
network resources and network services and efficiently run
arbitrary services on a per-network basis (Fig. 1(b)), rather than
inefficiently operating multiple networks on a per-service basis
(Fig. 1(a)). Moreover, as service needs change, SDN lends
support for on-demand, software-based addition or removal
of services to/from the network that is analogous to managing
apps on a smart phone (Fig. 1(b)). While first deployments
of SDN occurred in the datacenter, the potential for large
capital and operational expense reductions and service-oriented
revenue growth renders SDN attractive for optical networks as
well.
A. OpenFlow
SDN principles are language-oriented, enabling complex
network policy to be clearly and intuitively described in terms

Fig. 1. Network control and data plane architectures for: (a) legacy distributed
control; and (b) centralized SDN control.

of usernames and hosts and implemented via simple flow-tables in switches. SDN principles are not, language-specific,
however, such that SDN can be implemented via different
programming languages. Historically, the original SDN implementation in [7] introduced a language termed Ethane, which
is in many ways a pre-cursor of OpenFlow. In Ethane, the
centralized controller uses the first packet of each flow for
connection setup, no communication occurs without explicit
controller permission, and distributed switches are just flow-tables which forward packets according to controller decisions
(i.e., network policy). The controller is logically centralized
but physically replicated. The switches only keep track of
in-progress flows using flow-tables that are much simpler than
network state-keeping formats in traditional Ethernet switches
or routers. Specifically, active flow table entries contain just
a header field (for packet matching/identification), an action
field (to tell a switch what to do with a given packet: forward,
drop, queue, etc.) and per-flow statistics, where a flow can
be regarded as any sequence of packets with the same logical
association (i.e., same packet header match; the Ethane packet
header used for matching was implemented as a field inserted
between the Ethernet and IP headers, for example.) Only the
controller can add flow entries, and network policy rules are
treated without intrinsic ordering, such that conflicting actions
on the same flow need to be resolved by the controller.
In OpenFlow (Fig. 2), many of the key features of Ethane
were preserved, such that an OpenFlow table also has the
simple match/action/statistics structure (Fig. 2(a)), wherein
the rule is to pick a packet parameter (i.e., header field), test
whether it matches pre-determined value(s), and based on that
match, perform a simple action. Examples or flow table rules
can thus include dropping all packets featuring Ethernet source
and destination headers that match target values, forwarding
all packets with certain IP source and destination headers, and
sending packets to the controller based on a customized mix

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Fig. 2. (a, top left) OpenFlow table structure; (b, rop right) Multi-layer switching using OpenFlow; (c, bottom) OpenFlow matching rule examples.

of Ethernet source and TCP/UDP destination port headers, as

in Fig. 2(b, c). As shown in Fig. 2(c), matches can be made
either on exact or wildcard header values, and in more recent
versions of OpenFlow [5], flow tables can also be concatenated
to support priority ordering in matching rules. As noted in [9],
and illustrated in Fig. 2, OpenFlow ultimately re-defines the
notion of an address from physical interface to entry in a
forwarding table, enabling addressing based on any bit(s) in
a packet. For example, as shown in Fig. 2(c), OpenFlow can
support matching on any combination of L2 to L4 headers,
efficiently abstracting layer-specific switching hardware into a
flow table. By moreover defining the destination as a process
or digital object rather than a physical interface, highly-efficient support of advanced and attractive services, such as
content-based routing and/or multicast, can also be enabled
[9]. New network functionality can be thus be introduced
as new matching combinations over multi-purpose hardware
(Fig. 1(b)) rather than as new protocols for hardware that is
already over-burdened by protocol specificity (Fig. 1(a)).
III. SDN AND OPENFLOW FOR OPTICAL NETWORKS
In recent years, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated
optical modulation, detection, and coding formats, highly
spectrally-efficient experimental verifications and/or field trials
of Terabit/s and beyond transmission rates have been achieved
in virtually all optical network segments [10][12]. However,
a growing gap between transmission capacity growth and
networking revenue growth has been identified and in large
part attributed to: i.) network management inefficiencies and
ii.) limitations in the networks ability to support bandwidth
on-demand features, which are becoming increasingly important for network monetization [13][17]. While these trends
apply to all segments of the optical network, given that the
heterogeneity of services, the dynamic nature of traffic patterns, and severity of cost constraints are highest in optical
access/aggregation networks, the exploration of SDN-based
solutions for monetizing network resources is perhaps most
compelling in this network domain. It is also noted that SDN
has unique synergy with digital signal processing (DSP)-based
optical access principles, since the new SDN functionality inherently requires a DSP-enhanced platform. In this section, the
extension of SDN principles to optical networking is discussed,
with a focus on the unique characteristics of this environment

and some resulting considerations for SDN and OpenFlow in

optical access/aggregation networks.
A. SDN in Multi-Layer, Multi-Segment Optical Networking
In current multi-layer, multi-segment optical networks,
manual intervention is needed both between network segments
on same layer (i.e., domains), and between layers in the same
domain (i.e., L4 IP and L0 optical) [14][16]. While this notably
increases costs and slows down dynamic resource provisioning,
interestingly enough, the current situation can be viewed as an
undesirable consequence of the separation between data and
control planes that multi-layer optical networks have adopted
from their inception. Specifically, by handling the control/data
plane separation in a multi-layer, multi-domain environment
through multiple data and control planes, highly redundant 1:1
mappings between physical and virtual resources were created,
resulting in large network overheads that drain profitability.
Although at first glance this might seem like a challenge that
is unique to optical transport networks, strong analogies can
be drawn to challenges facing both fixed/mobile and access/
aggregation network convergence, where optical fiber connectivity is playing an increasingly dominant role [17]. Currently,
there are too many networks here too and CAPEX and OPEX
are too high. The promise of SDN in multi-layer optical networking thus hinges not only on the separation of data and
control planes and centralized, programmable control these
features have been present all along but on a unified control plane that can intelligently virtualize the entire network
and more efficiently manage a plurality of requests and network elements. An analytical model for this view of optical
SDN was proposed in [18] and exploited to minimize latency
and compare cost in optical networks with variable degrees of
SDN functionality. An important conclusion arising from [18]
is that, in order to minimize both latency and energy consumption (e.g., by minimizing the number of hops across layers),
switching/routing should take place on the lowest network layer
whenever possible. This in turn means that the optical layer
should be involved in the SDN process, enabling optical technology to differentiate itself in everything at which it may be
best, from high-speed transmission, to dynamic, energy-efficient switching. However, while potential benefits of this approach include both lower latency (via multi-layer cut-through)

CVIJETIC et al.: SDN AND OPENFLOW FOR DYNAMIC FLEX-GRID OPTICAL ACCESS

and on-demand optical bandwidth provisioning, the SDN controller must be able to understand the key capabilities of the
optical layer [6], [13][16]. Without this awareness, it is dubious whether the controller can truly match network resources
and applications in an optimal way, without complicating network management. A concrete approach for enabling this is to
extend the adopted SDN language to speak in terms of a standardized, concise parameter set. For example, by extending the
L2-L4 OpenFlow matching rules (Fig. 2) to include L0 parameters (e.g., optical wavelength, modulation format, etc.), application-aware, on-demand wavelength circuit provisioning can be
introduced. This is especially important for optical access/aggregation networks where dynamic L0 circuits can be used to
quickly deploy new services (e.g., mobile backhaul, desk-tomobile, enterprise, datacenter/cloud computing, etc.), and better
monetize existing optical networks with large legacy infrastructure investments (e.g., PON).
B. Dynamic Optical Layer Circuit Creation via OpenFlow
Extending the SDN language, in this case OpenFlow, to the
optical layer inevitably raises vital questions about how to correctly abstract, or virtualize, the optical network. Unlike in the
datacenter where virtualizing the server means taking one device and making it look like many virtual machines, virtualizing the network means taking many devices and making them
look like one big switch that enables a flat topology with on-demand any-to-any connectivity. In a networking environment
with a nearly fully-meshed physical topology and a low degree
of physical-layer constraints (e.g., the datacenter), the network
in a sense virtualizes itself. However, in optical networks
from access/aggregation to the core these assumptions increasingly do not hold. The inherently analog nature of optics
and the ability of the optical layer to behave either as a wavelength, a circuit, or a packet switch highlight the tremendous
potential and challenge of virtualizing optical networks. Fundamental fiber channel impairments and fiber topology constraints
must also be accounted for. Consequently, given the massive
parameter space that could be exposed to the OpenFlow controller, the selection of the optimal subspace is a largely open
question, currently being tackled by prominent standardization
bodies including the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) [19]
and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) [20]. To some extent, the right parameter set may also depend on the network
app in question. In this case, the target app is OpenFlow-enabled L0 dynamic circuit creation for mobile backhaul in legacy
PON, done in such a way that the implementation features no remote ONU-side optical amplification, filtering, or coherent detection. To support high-speed MBH signal coexistence with
legacy OOK-modulated PON services via frequency-domain
orthogonality, OFDMA can be adopted on L0 of the MBH flow.
To allocate OFDMA subcarriers to different MBH cells, guarantee per-cell bit rates, and avoid OOK/OFDMA signal overlap,
the controller needs to know OFDMA subcarrier frequencies
and modulation formats. From this physical-layer architecture
definition then arises the L0 parameter set for the OpenFlow
controller, comprising: i.) optical wavelength; ii.) modulation

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Fig. 3. Optical spectrum allocation in passive optical networks.

format; and iii.) OFDMA subcarrier frequency. The full architecture is detailed next.
IV. PROPOSED FLEX-GRID OPTICAL ACCESS ARCHITECTURE
Given the aforementioned emphasis on dynamic bandwidth
provisioning in modern networks, an important SDN app
for optical access is the ability to make spectrum available
on-demand. Perhaps the most pressing use case for this is mobile backhaul, but others can also be envisioned, ranging from
high-end residential to special-purpose connectivity in settings where a complete PON upgrade cannot be economically
justified. However, as surprising as it may be at first glance,
the provisioning of wavelengths in optical access is quite
challenging due to a high degree of spectrum fragmentation
and gridlock in existing deployments (Fig. 3). In legacy PONs,
very large operational bands are allocated to services with significantly lower data rates in order to use cheaper optics. Large
inter-service guard-bands are likewise allocated for similar
reasons. Concatenations of this approach across generations
of technologies and services have given rise to holes in the
optical spectrum that notably constrain the available spectral
space (Fig. 3). Rayleigh scattering, water peaks, optical time
domain reflectometry (OTDR) for fiber fault identification, and
the spectral coverage of standardized connectors and splitters
also impose additional spectrum restrictions. As summarized
in Fig. 3, the overall conclusion may be reached that optical
spectrum is a precious resource in optical access/aggregation
networks as well.
The rising incentive for spectral efficiency in optical access
is counterpoised by the conventional method of scaling transmission capacity in optical networks by introducing new wavelength channels based on a fixed, standardized grid. In PON,
to complement fixed wavelength assignment at the OLT, optical tunability would need to be exploited at the ONUs to select the target wavelength. The difficulty with this approach
is that it can partition the spectrum even further through limited ONU-side tunability. Such limitations also mandate large
inter-wavelength channel spacing and may rely on tunable devices (e.g., optical filters) that are not yet commercially mature
and could thus delay new service introduction. The flex-grid
SDN-based approach proposed here, however, centralizes optical wavelength tunability, shifting this functionality from the
ONUs to the OLT, such that the implementation would rely
on OLT-side tunable lasers and no ONU-side optical filtering.
From a technology maturity perspective, C-band tunable lasers
are more advanced than tunable filters, while in terms of cost,

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Fig. 4. Proposed OpenFlow-based flex-grid -flow architecture for 4 G 150 Mb/s per-cell OFDMA MBH overlays onto legacy PON.
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;
;
.

they are only marginally more expensive than their fixed-wavelength counterparts. With centralized tunability, the marginal
cost increases can also be amortized over many ONUs. The use
of tunable lasers at the OLT also provides a full virtualization of
the optical spectrum space, enabling arbitrary flex-grid wavelength selection, and obviating the need for a universal physical wavelength plan that would otherwise be necessary to drive
cost-efficiency through volume of non-tunable components. To
support interoperability (e.g., of hardware from different vendors), a generic OpenFlow interface can be used. Another key
advantage of such optical spectrum virtualization is that it can
accommodate variability in operator needs and make arbitrary
wavelengths available on-demand through software-reconfigurable control that can be customized for each particular network. Finally, regardless of the specific use case, the proposed
approach features ONU-side benefits of no optical filtering, amplification or coherent detection over reach and passive splits
envisioned for next-generation systems.
Fig. 4 presents the proposed architecture: the software-defined -planning algorithm with a global view of the physical
wavelength space,
, computes assignment metrics
for incoming flows according to customizable rather than
fixed criteria. Metrics can thus range from maximized spectral
efficiency (e.g., via the meta-MAC [6]), to relative intensity
noise requirements (for RF video coexistence), to a basic
heuristic that populates an ITU-T grid. On the physical layer,
dynamic assignment is done by tuning the wavelength of
OLT-side temperature-controlled DFB lasers in the 10 G SD Tx
and MBH SD Tx using an extended OpenFlow API that controls the underlying laser firmware (FW). Physical downstream
(DS) and upstream (US) connections can be thus virtualized as
logical flows between bidirectional OpenFlow port identifiers
(e.g., 1 to 5 in Fig. 4.) As such, they can be viewed, queried, and
modified in software through the flow map graphical user interface (GUI). To create new flows (i.e., add new OpenFlow table
entries), the centralized E-OpenFlow controller can exploit the
command and match the SD -planner decisions
to the corresponding OpenFlow ports: e.g., match
to ports
1 and 5 for DS 10 G OOK transmission,
to ports 2 and 4
for DS OFDMA MBH, and
to ports 4 and 3 for US MBH

(Fig. 4). Specifically, using the OpenFlow 1.0 API [5], the
16-bit VLAN identifier field can be used for -flow mapping,
while the 16-bit vendor-specific Action field can be populated
with additional sub- parameters, such as the OFDMA MBH
subcarrier frequencies and modulation formats. By tracking
these values, the SD -planner can minimize sub- frequency
overlap between OFDMA MBH and 10 Gb/s OOK flows. For
150 Mb/s per-cell OFDMA MBH over 1:64 split PON and 20%
forward error correction (FEC) overhead, a 12 Gb/s OFDMA
signal (3 GHz with 16-QAM symbol mapping) is sufficient, and
can be output at
sub- frequencies by the OFDMA
Tx to reduce OOK/OFDMA spectral overlap. At the filterless
SD 10 G ONUs, the OFDMA signal will thus land outside of
the 10 G Rx front-end, which will intrinsically act as a low-pass
filter for theOFDMA MBH signal. Signal-signal beating of
the OFDMA subcarriers will however fall within the 10 G Rx
passband (Fig. 4(i)), effectively behaving as additional noise to
be handled via FEC. Each filterless direct detection SD MBH
ONU will detect both OFDMA and 10 G OOK DS signals, but
will isolate its designated OFDMA frequencies in DSP, and
will handle any remaining interference from 10 G OOK via
enhanced FEC. Commercialized hard decision FEC with 20%
overhead enables bit error rate (BER) tolerance of 1.1
[6], and can be achieved using continuously-interleaved BCH
hard-decision decoding techniques that feature 18 Mbit latency [21]. For 10 Gb/s OFDMA-based MBH overlays, this
translates to 100800
FEC processing latencies, remaining
under 1 ms even in the worst case. Moreover, as shown in [22],
optical Nyquist filtering of legacy OOK can be used to notably
reduce OOK/OFDMA spectral overlap, such that FEC with
7% overhead can be used for the OFDMA signal in 20 km
with 1:64 passive split scenarios. For dynamic US flows,
OpenFlow-based control is used on the OLT-side flex-grid
wavelength selective switch (WSS) to dynamically create
pass-bands with variable center frequencies and sizes. Because the pass-bands can be software-reconfigured to track US
flows, ONU-side tunable laser requirements can be relaxed
without a wide US spectrum;
US transmission
could thus be realized in 4 100GHz using low-cost ONU-side
lasers. Finally, no ONU-side optical amplification is used.

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Fig. 5. Experimental setup of SD E-OpenFlow OFDMA MBH over legacy PON; Fig. 5(d,e) 0.01 nm resolution; Fig. 5(g) 0.05 nm resolution.
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V. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS

Fig. 5 shows the experimental setup. An out-of-band
TCP/Ethernet connection was used to link a PC hosting a flow
map GUI, SD planner (XML interface), and an extended
OpenFlow 1.0 controller and API with 7 OpenFlow ports.
Each 10 G SD Tx consisted of a C-band tunable DFB laser,
10.7 Gb/s NRZ OOK encoder, FEC encoder used for BER
measurement, and a 10 GHz intensity modulator (IM). DS/US
flows between OpenFlow 1.0 ports were established using
the
command. Because OpenFlow 1.0 did not
consider L0 circuits in optics, such extensions are needed to L0
match/actions possible and create flows. (It is noted that the
latest version of OpenFlow 1.3 could also have been used, but
unlike OpenFlow 1.0, it has not yet been standardized.) The
needed L0 extension of OpenFlow 1.0 is thus made by using
the VLAN field for -flow identification and taking advantage
of vendor-specific action fields for sub-lambda parameter
mapping (e.g., OFDMA subcarrier frequencies and modulation
formats). An example is shown in Fig. 5(b,i) for integer-valued
matching to
at input
port 2 and output port 7 [Fig. 5(b,ii)] to create the DS 10 G
OOK flow. An example of the vendor-specific action field
conveying additional parameters, such as the modulation
format is shown in Fig. 5(b,iii). A 12.75 Gb/s OFDM signal
(16-QAM symbol mapping, FFT size of 256, 20% FEC and
7.5% training overhead) was generated offline and output continuously by a 12 GS/s arbitrary waveform generator (AWG),
and upconverted to
(Fig. 5(c)). A tunable
DFB laser (
in Fig. 5), 40 GHz optical
IM and a tunable optical filter were used to create the 7 dBm

optical single-sideband OFDMA signal (Fig. 5(d)), which was

passively combined with the DS 10 Gb/s OOK channel (3 dBm
launch power) and transmitted over 20 km of SSMF followed
by 18 dB total attenuation (1:64 split). The flex-grid spacing
between the DS OFDMA and OOK channels (Fig. 5(e)) was
varied between 41.25 GHz and 141.25 GHz with both signals
directly photodetected without receiver-side optical filtering
or amplification. A 20 GHz PIN + TIA was used for OFDMA
photodetection (Fig. 5(f)), followed by digitization using a
40 GS/s real-time scope and off-line processing to compute
BER based on 250,000 measured bits. Only digital filtering
(no analog RF pre-filtering) was used to remove the OOK
signal and 10.7 GHz clock tone from the OFDMA spectrum
of Fig. 5(f). Two US 10 Gb/s OOK signals were passively
combined with 100 GHz spacing, with a 1:4 flex-grid WSS
software-configured to create a tunable 50 GHz slot for US
signal reception (Fig. 5(g)). The BER for each US channel
was measured with the FEC decoder of each SD 10 G Rx (7%
overhead, FEC limit
) based on 6
.
Figs. 68 plot the measured BER for 12.75 Gb/s DS OFDMA,
10 Gb/s DS OOK, and 2 10 Gb/s US OOK, respectively, for
the SD OpenFlow setup of Fig. 5. As shown by Fig. 6, for
DS OFDMA, there was virtually no penalty between optical
back-to-back (btb) and fiber transmission, while the addition of
the DS 10 Gb/s OOK channel imposed a 1.8 dB penalty at the
FEC limit (
) for all three flex-grid spacings (41.25 GHz, 58.75 GHz, 141.25 GHz). Fig. 6 also confirms
OFDMA receiver sensitivity corresponding to a
22.7 dB power budget. As shown in Fig. 7, for DS 10 Gb/s OOK,
the FEC limit was achieved at
received power for
all three flex-grid cases, corresponding to a 1 dB penalty

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VI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

We have discussed SDN and OpenFlow principles for flexgrid optical access/aggregation networks, and experimentally
demonstrated the first OpenFlow1.0-based flex-grid -flow architecture for dynamic 150 Mb/s per-cell 4 G OFDMA MBH
overlays onto 10 Gb/s PON without ONU-side optical filtering,
amplification, or coherent detection, over 20 km SSMF with a
1:64 passive split. By enabling interoperable on-demand optical
spectrum allocation, the novel approach is promising for future
access networks.
REFERENCES
Fig. 6. Downstream BER, OFDMA.

Fig. 7. Downstream BER, 10 Gb/s OOK.

Fig. 8. Upstream BER, 2

10 Gb/s OOK.

with respect to optical back-to-back and to a 26.5 dB power

budget. The saturation of the OFDMA+OOK BER curves in
both Figs. 6 and 7 is directly attributed to mutual interference between the two signals, which increases with increasing received
power but showed only minor dependence on spacings
. The US BER results are shown in Fig. 8, confirming
receiver sensitivities for
and
for both
back-to-back and US fiber transmission, and revealing negligible penalty from the OFDMA and OOK backscatter signal
(Fig. 5(g)), which was successfully removed by the SD flex-grid
WSS.

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