**Principles and Applications**

Yongli Zhao, Yuqiao Wang, Wei Wang and

Xiaosong Yu

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.68294

#### **Abstract**

Featured by the advantages of high capacity, long transmission distance, and low energy consumption, optical network has been deployed widely as the most important infra‐ structure for backbone transport network. With the development of Internet, datacenter has become the popular infrastructure for cloud computing, which needs to be connected with high bitrate transport network to support heterogeneous applications. In this case, optical network also becomes a promising option for intra and inter‐datacenter network‐ ing. In the networking field, software‐defined networking (SDN) has gained a lot of attention from both academic and industry, and it aims to provide a flexible and pro‐ grammable control plane. SDN is applicable to optical network, and the optical network integrated with SDN, namely software‐defined optical network (SDON), are expected as the future transport solutions, which can provide both high bitrate connectivity and flexible network applications. The principles and applications of SDON are introduced in this chapter.

**Keywords:** optical network, SDON, Datacenter, key technologies, applications
