# Proposers - Antonio Ginés Buendía López (E-lighthouse Network Solutions) - Enrique Fernández Sánchez (E-lighthouse Network Solutions) - Francisco Javier Moreno Muro (E-lighthouse Network Solutions) # Description This feature proposes a new SDN controller component that standardizes a novel interface and functional module to interact with an external network planning and optimization tool. The component acts as an abstraction and integration layer between the SDN controller ecosystem and the E-lighthouse Network Planner (ENP), enabling advanced optical network slicing workflows. The component exposes a gRPC-based interface to the controller main bus and provides a set of gRPC operations to manage network context, optical slices, and services. It supports the collection of network topology from multiple SDN controllers, retrieving their topology information in standardized IETF-NETWORK or TAPI models, and exporting it as network context to the external tool. Additionally, the component enables optical slice provisioning by accepting slice intents compliant with the IETF Network Slice framework and delegating planning and optimization decisions to ENP, returning the recommended optical slice actions. This module is a key enabler for optical network slicing demonstrations within the ALLEGRO project, leveraging ENP as the external planning and decision-making engine. # Demo or definition of done The feature will be considered complete when the following high-level conditions are met: - A gRPC interface is available and integrated with the SDN controller main bus. - Network topology can be successfully collected from one or more SDN controllers in IETF-NETWORK or TAPI format and exported to ENP as network context. - An optical slice intent compliant with the IETF Network Slice model can be processed, resulting in a recommended optical slice action from ENP. - A media-channel can be provisioned over an optical slice, generating a consistent list of provisioning actions. - CRUD operations for querying and managing network context, optical slices, and services are implemented and validated. - The complete workflow is demonstrated in the context of an ALLEGRO optical slicing demo using ENP. ## Acknowledgements This work is partially funded by the European Commission through the ALLEGRO project (G.A. 101070009). # References 1. IETF Network Slice. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9543/ 2. IETF Network Topology. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8345 3. Transport API (TAPI). https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9622/ 4. E-lighthouse Network Planner (ENP), E-lighthouse Network Solutions. https://www.e-lighthouse.com/products/networkplanner