Experimental demonstration of datacenter networking based on software defined optical networks with flexible ROADM

Computing and storage resources are two kinds of important resources for cloud computing, which are provided by different datacenters distributed at different positions. Then, datacenter networking is necessary for high efficient resource provisioning. Flexi-grid optical network is considered as a promising technology for datacenter networking because of its high spectrum efficiency and fine switching granularities. Meanwhile, as a centralized control model, the software defined networking (SDN) enabled by OpenFlow protocol can provide high flexibility for the networks and make a unified control over various resources for the joint optimization of datacenter and network resources. A datacenter networking architecture is proposed in this paper, which is implemented based on software defined optical networks (SDON) with flexible reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM). A testbed is built with coordinated virtualization of distributed datacenters and operator's multi-domain SDON with flexible ROADM. The overall feasibility and efficiency of two virtual network composition schemes are proposed and investigated on our testbed.