The need for a Control Orchestration Protocol in research projects on optical networking

The Control Orchestration Protocol (COP) abstracts a common set of control plane functions used by an various SDN controllers, allowing the interworking of heterogeneous control plane paradigms (i.e., OpenFlow, GMPLS/PCE). COP has been defined using YANG model language and can be transported using RESTconf, which is being incorporated by industry. COP has been defined in the scope of STRAUSS due to the need for an overarching control plane protocol for network orchestration. In this paper, several research projects describe how the COP could fit in their architecture and propose a use case for COP usage. The proposed COP use cases cover the following research projects: STRAUSS, IDEALIST, DISCUS, COMBO, INSPACE.