On the basis of the analysis of the five development trends of Optical Transport Networks(OTN)
this paper points out that the Software Defined Network(SDN)technology will have direct or indirect impacts on three of them
specifically embodied in four aspects:software defined transport plane
software defined control plane
IP and optical cross-layer cooperation and convergence and optical network resource virtualization.Research results show that SDN is an important trend of OTN beyond 100Gbit/s.