OIF and ONF to co-operate on standards

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has started work on APIs for the software-defined networking era.

The work is a follow-on from the joint meeting of OIF and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) that identified what's missing in optical transport APIs to let user applications talk to the underlying network.

The ultimate aim, the automatically switched optical network, would help usher in services in which carriers can offer customers more granular self-management of their network services. For example, a data centre could ramp up a carrier service during a backup window, and release it when it's no longer needed.

The OIF says its new project will develop implementation agreements for APIs between application and network controller. The group will also create IAs for “service request, path computation, topology and link resource manager interfaces” that the OIF had identified in its SDN framework.

OIF technical committee vice chair Jonathan Sadler says that “The programmability of Transport SDN requires some of the internal interfaces used by ASON to become open”.

The forum identifies the Service API as being of particular importance. This is the interface that lets applications ask the network for connectivity services, in multi-domain and multi-vendor environments where different network units use different control methods. The Topology API is self-explanatory: it provides applications with information about the connectivity available. ®