Leveraging Programmability of Photonic Devices Towards Agile and Autonomous Optical Networks

The emergence and consolidation of increasingly programmable optical devices (transceivers, amplifiers, multiplexers), which allow their remote configuration and control into multiple modes of operation, is enabling the evolution towards more autonomous networks. Such networks leverage this programmability and are able to adapt and react to traffic and network condition changes, paving the way for the increased adoption of AI/ML models in support of network operation. In this paper, we review key elements in the control and orchestration systems of optical networks in support of autonomous networking, including configuration and optical telemetry aspects and we present some uses cases focusing on our evolving prototype of sliceable bandwidth variable transceiver, focusing on the design of the SDN agent.