The dynamicity of today’s optical networks is far from its potential. Optical components, such as fast-tunable lasers or semiconductor optical amplifiers, can react on a nanosecond time scale, while the reconfiguration time of optical networks is many orders of magnitude larger, normally above a hundreds of milliseconds timescale. In this work, we address this gap with real-time control plane strategies that enhance the responsiveness of optical networks, specifically in the context of time-critical applications where service determinism is of paramount importance. This context represents an additional challenge since the infrastructure necessary to provide time-wise guarantees increases the complexity of the system under control. We describe in detail the real-time control plane for deterministic and dynamic networks and assess its value through experimental evaluation for the first time to our knowledge of a complete real-time control plane within a multinetwork segment testbed. We prove submillisecond overall reconfiguration time for multinetwork segment environments spanning distances of the order of tens of kilometers.

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