LOCARN Low Opex and Capex Architecture for Resilient Networks (04-Nov-2009)

LOCARN

L ow O pex and C apex A rchitecture for R esilient N etworks

  A new approach for Transmission Networks
in line with "Autonomic Networking" functionalities

LOCARN, what is it?

Locarn is above all a delightful little village in Brittany

- http://lokarn.free.fr/

But LOCARN is also

- Anew concept of Transport Network that completely revisit data,

control and management planes habits with the colors of "Autonomic Networking" functionalities

- Awill to share this concept with the whole community
- Awillto build a test bed to prove the relevance of the concepts

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LOCARN claims to

Dramatically decrease the Capex of the network

- Relies on very simple hardware without expensive development
- Optimizes dynamically the resources

Drastically decrease the Opex

- Plug&Play, no management at the transport level required
- Low protocol stack and less processing should generate energy saving
- Power consumption optimisation

Offer the main features of the autonomic networking paradigm self-*

- -discovery, -healing, -optimization, -management, protection*,…

Offer a "Carrier Grade" set of performance (scalability, protection,…)

Be agnostic (at least in the principle)of a lower Transport layer as well as

the Service Layer
Be "Post IP" oriented

- Fully agnostic of frame format used by the services
- No IP Network needed for management

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General principles of the Data Plane

Data Plane uses Auto-forwarding features
- Very close (but simpler) to the Dynamic Source Routing used in RFC for ad- hoc networks

Each frame has in its header all the information required to forward it from

source to destination
- asequence of "ports*" meaning the output at each node
- An hop count
- Additional information such asa service identifier, QoS parameters,…

Forwarding process in 2 steps
- First read and decrement the hop count
- Then push the frame at the port* indicated in the table for the hop count (if not null e.g. port P)

- If hop count is null (e.g. port PE), address the frame regarding its

service identifier

* Regarding the used technologies,ports may have various meanings

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A very simple Data Plane

No table in transfer nodes (P-nodes)

No explicit Knowledge about the topology Ability to change the route frame by frame

It is so simple that we can envisage to

- Switch the payload at the photonic level
- Process the frame header also at the photonic layer

Simplicity should bring CAPEX saving

Expected photonic process should provide Energy savings

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Control Plane principles

Control plane mainly operates on the...