Summary

Recommendation ITU-T G.7703 describes the reference architecture and requirements for the automatically switched optical network (ASON) as applicable to connection-oriented circuit or packet transport networks. This reference architecture is described in terms of the key functional components and the interactions between them and uses concepts from ITU-T G.7701 that are common to both ASON and software defined networking (SDN) control of transport networks as described in ITU‑T G.7702.