Time-aware software defined networking (Ta-SDN) for flexi-grid optical networks supporting data center application

Data center interconnected by flexi-grid optical networks is a promising scenario to meet the high burstiness and high-bandwidth requirement of data center application, because flexi-grid optical networks can allocate spectral resources for applications in a dynamic, tunable and efficient control manner. Meanwhile, as centralized control architecture, the software defined networking (SDN) enabled by OpenFlow protocol can provide maximum flexibility for the networks and make a unified control over various resources for the joint optimization of data center and network resource. Time factor is first introduced into SDN based control architecture for flexi-grid optical networks supporting data center application. Traffic model considering time factor is built and a requirement parameter i.e. bandwidth-delay product is adopted for the service requirement measurement. Then, time-aware software defined networking (Ta-SDN) based control architecture is designed with OpenFlow protocol extension. A novel time-correlated PCE (TC-PCE) algorithm is proposed for the time-correlated service under Ta-SDN based control architecture, which can complete data center selection, path computation and bandwidth resource allocation. Finally, simulation results shows that our proposed Ta-SDN control architecture and time-correlated PCE algorithm can improve the application and network performance to a large extent in blocking probability.