Management of Sliceable Transponder with NETCONF and YANG Matteo Dallaglio ∗ , Nicola Sambo ∗ , Filippo Cugini † and Piero Castoldi ∗ ∗ Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy Email: m.dallaglio@sssup.it † CNIT, Pisa, Italy Abstract—NETCONF is emerging as Software Defined Net- working (SDN) protocol for the control and management of optical networks. It enables data plane device configuration and access to monitoring information. NETCONF may exploit YANG data model to describe network elements to be controlled/man- aged. YANG and NETCONF are of interest for operators since they provide a standard way to control and manage network elements, independently from the vendor. This paper presents and demonstrates a management plane based on NETCONF protocol. In particular, a YANG model describing optical transponders supporting slice-ability, variable rate, and monitoring functionalities is proposed. NETCONF experimental demonstrations are carried out to validate the proposed model and to prove the control and management capa- bilities of these technologies applied to elastic optical networks (EONs). Index Terms—NETCONF, YANG, Sliceable Transponder, EON, SBVT, slice-ability, elastic. I. I NTRODUCTION Data and control plane of optical networks have expe- rienced relevant advances in the recent years. Considering data plane technologies, sliceable transponders are emerging as a technology meeting the requirements of operators to support variable bit-rate, optimizing the spectral efficiency based on the required optical reach — thus supporting multiple modulation formats or forward error correction (FEC) — and also enabling slice-ability (i.e., the capability of generating independent optical flows to be directed toward different paths and destinations) [1]–[4]. Such transponders, thanks to coherent detection, also support monitoring of transmission parameters (e.g., pre-FEC bit error rate —pre-FEC BER) [5]. These technologies aims to increase both the scalability and agility of the transport network, allowing resource optimiza- tion and scaling of bandwidth as demands change and increase. However, while data and control planes have experienced such advances, the innovations in the management plane still need improvements [6] to develop management mechanisms to reduce deployment and operational complexity and maximize benefits of EONs capabilities. Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) [7] is emerg- ing as an SDN protocol standardized by the Internet Engineer- ing Task Force (IETF), providing both control (e.g., data plane device configuration) and management functionalities (e.g., ac- cess to monitoring information). NETCONF protocol provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete management states and information of network devices. NETCONF may rely on the Yet Another Next Generation (YANG) modelling language [8], [9] to describe network devices in a standard way. YANG and NETCONF are gaining interest for operators and research since they provide a standard way to control and manage network elements, independently from the vendor [10]. NETCONF and YANG have been introduced in several networking scenarios. For example, in [11], authors pro- pose a NETCONF agent for link state monitoring compared with other management technologies such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). In [12], authors highlight the benefits provided by NETCONF in terms of security and scalability, compared with SNMP and REpresentational State Transfer (REST). In [13], authors uses YANG and NETCONF to manage a 10G-PON. Preliminary works of YANG mod- elling applied to EONs are mentioned in [14]. However, the YANG model has not been reported, and NETCONF is not fully supported. All the mentioned works do not address a definition of a YANG model for sliceable transponders in EONs employing NETCONF protocol. This paper presents and demonstrates a control and manage- ment plane based on NETCONF protocol exploiting YANG model. In particular, the proposed YANG model describes transponders based on multi-carrier technology, enabling slice- ability and variable baud rate, bit rate, number of carriers, FEC, and modulation format, and supporting the monitoring of several physical parameters such as chromatic dispersion, BER, Q-factor, and others. The paper presents a management experiment using NETCONF exploiting the proposed YANG model. In particular, the controller performs device state discovery, and monitoring information polling. II. YANG AND NETCONF YANG is a data modelling language that can be used to express the structure and semantics of a device information in a vendor-neutral format [8]. Two types of information are present in a YANG model: configuration data and state (operational) data. Configuration data are explicitly set by an external entity on the system. State data reflects the parameters that cannot be set by an external entity (some of these data are fixed by the vendor). 20th International Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM 2016), May 9-12, 2016, Cartagena, Spain 978-1-4673-9988-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE