Data center network placement and service protection in all-optical mesh networks

Cloud services based on data center networks (DCNs) require a transmission infrastructure with high-capacity, low-latency, low-cost and high-availability, which can be offered by survivable optical networks. DCN placement is a fundamental issue in supporting cloud services in optical networks. It concerns not only the cost of providing cloud services, but also the service availability against failures via proper service replicas. In this paper, we jointly optimize DCN placement with service routing and protection to minimize the network cost, while ensuring fast protection of all services against a single link or server failure. An ILP (Integer Linear Program) is formulated to achieve optimal joint design. It integrates p-cycle (preconfigured protection cycle) for fast protection against a single link failure, and DCN replicas and fast service rerouting against a server failure. To make the design more scalable, a two-step heuristic is proposed for large-size networks. The first step separately solves the DCN placement and service routing problem in the failure-free scenario, and the second step takes fast service protection into account. The proposed design is validated by extensive simulation studies.