Future Network & MobileSummit 2013 Conference Proceedings Paul Cunningham and Miriam Cunningham (Eds) IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-905824-37-3 IDEALIST Control and Service Management Solutions for Dynamic and Adaptive Flexi-grid DWDM Networks Raul MUÑOZ 1 , Víctor LÓPEZ 2 , Ramon CASELLAS 1 , Óscar GONZÁLEZ DE DIOS 2 , Filippo CUGINI 3 , Nicola SAMBO 3 , Antonio D’ERRICO 4 , Ori GERSTEL 5 , Daniel KING 6 , Sergio LÓPEZ-BUEDO 7 , Patricia LAYEC 8 , Antonio CIMMINO 9 , Ricardo MARTÍNEZ 1 , Roberto MORRO 10 1 CTTC, Av. Carl Friedrich Gauss 7, Castelldefels, 08860, Spain Tel: +34 93 6452913, Fax: +34 93 6452901, Email: raul.munoz@cttc.es 2 Telefónica I+D, c/ Don Ramón de la Cruz 84, Madrid, 28006, Spain 3 CNIT, Pisa, Italy. 4 Ericsson Telecomunicazioni SpA, Via G.Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy 5 Cisco Systems Inc., Israel. 6 Old dog Consulting, Graythwaite, LA12 8BA, UK. 7 NAUDIT HPCN, c/ Faraday 7, Madrid, 28049, Spain 8 Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, Route de Villejust, Nozay, 91620, France 9 Alcatel Lucent Italia, Via Bosco Primo, Battipaglia, Italy 10 Telecom Italia, Via Reiss Romoli 274, Torino, 10148, Italy Abstract: Wavelength Switched Optical Networks (WSON) were designed with the premise that all channels in a network have the same spectrum needs, based on the ITU-T DWDM grid. However, this rigid grid-based approach is not adapted to the spectrum requirements of the signals that are best candidates for long-reach transmission and high-speed data rates of 400Gbps and beyond. An innovative approach is to evolve the fixed DWDM grid to a flexible grid, in which the optical spectrum is partitioned into fixed-sized spectrum slices. This allows facilitating the required amount of optical bandwidth and spectrum for an elastic optical connection to be dynamically and adaptively allocated by assigning the necessary number of slices of spectrum. The ICT IDEALIST project will provide the architectural design, protocol specification, implementation, evaluation and standardization of a control plane and a network and service management system. This architecture and tools are necessary to introduce dynamicity, elasticity and adaptation in flexi-grid DWDM networks. This paper provides an overview of the objectives, framework, functional requirements and use cases of the elastic control plane and the adaptive network and service management system targeted in the ICT IDEALIST project. Keywords: GMPLS/PCE control plane, adaptive network manager, elastic networks 1. Introduction IP backbone networks rely on dynamic transport networks to enable IP traffic offloading. Traffic Offloading allows reducing costs, simplifying operations, and increasing the network scalability, since IP packets are directly sent from the ingress to the egress router using a transport connection at layer 2 (e.g. in OTN or MPLS-TP networks) or/and layer 1, such as a lightpath within the so called Wavelength Switched Optical Networks (WSONs). WSONs were designed with the premise that all channels in a network have the same spectrum needs (e.g. a 50 GHz channel spacing is the most common approach for 100Gb/s transmission, requiring 37,5 GHz with DP-QPSK). In this sense, the ITU-T normalized the Copyright © 2013 The authors www.FutureNetworkSummit.eu/2013 Page 1 of 10