Open source implementation of openconfig telemetry-enabled NETCONF agent

Next generation networks are evolving towards disaggregated schemes, where the structure of the optical nodes presents multiple components to be combined and built into a complete solution (i.e., white-box concept). In such a scenario, operators and service providers are supporting vendor neutrality to enhance devices interoperability, simplify the control-plane operation and reduce network costs. OpenConfig is a working group of network operators focused on the definition of a set of vendor-neutral data models allowing dynamicity and programmability of the infrastructure by means of software-defined networking paradigm. Moreover, the telemetry functionality is a novel solution for network monitoring in which real time data and statistics are efficiently streamed from devices.In this paper, we propose an open-source implementation of an OpenConfig NETCONF agent enhanced with telemetry. The adoption of the gRPC-based telemetry allows the streaming of monitoring parameters from the transponders. In fact, the controller is able to request the streaming of one or more selected parameter(s), on demand and with proper granularity, in order to detect and localize the presence of a fault or identify hardware degradation. The implemented telemetry-enabled NETCONF agent for transponders has been experimentally validated over an Elastic Optical Networks (EON) scenario, highlighting the main functionalities and the effectiveness of the proposed solution.