Bringing Optical Network Control to the User Facilities: Evolution of the User-Controlled LightPath Provisioning Paradigm

During the last years, a trend has emerged at universities, large enterprises, government institutions, hospitals and public institutions towards acquiring and deploying their own dark-fibre or wavelength networks as opposed to purchasing bandwidth network services from the traditional operators. These institutions usually follow the condominium model to build and deploy their network. The parties get together in a joint effort to purchase the network equipment and deploy the dark fibre. Each institution gets a subset of the deployed fibre and part of the available ports, proportional to their initial investment. However, each institution manages their resources independently of the other organisations that share the physical substrate. Traditional control plane architectures cannot address the requirements of this type of networks, because they assume a single entity has administrative control of all the network elements in a physical domain.