sonic-otn-wg will focus on enabling SONiC to support optical transport equipment, including

• Optical transponders/muxponders.
• Optical line equipment such as optical amplifiers, wavelength selective switches.
• Optical DWDM/Grey pluggable modules on switching/routing equipment.
• Packet-optical device (ex. Cassini) with both packet and optical functionality (Stretched goal).

The following diagrams illustrate end to end network deployment with SONiC as open source NOS for both packet and optical network.

Two years, by December, 2024

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gantt
title SONiC-OTN group timeline

SONiC-OTN Group Kick off    :done,  des1, 2023-01-01,90d
Source Code Open Sourced           :done,  des2, after des1, 180d
Submit SONiC-OTN to SONiC master      :crit,  des3, after des2, 240d
Support More SONiC-OTN platforms    :active,  des4, after des3, 180d
Target SONiC 202411 branch  :milestone, 2024-011-30, 0d

• Optical Transport Abstraction Interface (OTAI) Specification and header files.
• Contribution to SONiC code base for support optical transport devices:
  • sonic-ot-vendorA.bin, for all devices of vendorA.
  • sonic-ot-vendorB.bin, for all devices of vendorB.
  • sonic-ot-vs.img.gz, Virtual optical device.
  • ONIE images for optical device families.

With above deliverables, SONiC effectively becomes a network operating system (NOS) supporting both packet switch and optical transport white box. Work-in-progress source code repository in Github.

All documents about this project can be find here.

This section provides a proposed specification for optical transport abstraction interface. It will be submitted to the community for review after a consensus is reached within sonic-otn working group. Please find OTAI spec here.

Please find sonic-otn high level design here which defines the design objectives and approaches of this project.

You can find the sonic-otn project development status and tasks here, and you can join the sonic-otn bi-weekly community meeting from the Calendar here