Monitoring and Data Analytics for Optical Networking: Benefits, Architectures, and Use Cases

Network operators regularly collect performance measurements from their network devices and use them mainly for performance reporting and troubleshooting purposes. However, the stringent performance requirements that multilayer optical transport networks will need to support in the near term, not only in terms of capacity, but also in terms of dynamicity, latency, availability, among others, together with the growing network complexity, necessitates increased levels of automation. Such network automation must target not only connection provisioning but also resource re-optimization to rapidly adapt the network to the expected conditions, quick degradation detection to improve the quality of the connections and failure detection and identification to facilitate maintenance. Network automation requires collection and monitoring of data, applied though data analytics algorithms to produce meaningful inputs for the network controller to program the underlying devices, in this article, we review the capabilities of current optical systems and the standardization status of data models, protocols and frameworks related to monitoring. Alternative architectures for monitoring and data analytics (MDA) are analyzed and illustrative control loops are presented aiming at validating the usefulness of MDA to automate optical networks operation.