Multibroker-Based Service Provisioning in Multidomain SD-EONs: Why and How Should the Brokers Cooperate With Each Other?

It is known that software-defined elastic optical networks (SD-EONs) facilitate optical networking that provides better network programmability, more powerful manageability, and more flexible service provisioning capability. Moreover, the hierarchical architecture of multibroker-based multidomain SD-EONs cannot only improve the network scalability but also maintain the autonomy of each administrative domain. In this paper, we study why and how the brokers should cooperate with each other to provision interdomain lightpaths in multibroker-based multidomain SD-EONs. We first formulate a cooperative market in which the brokers negotiate about their market shares (i.e., the opportunities to provision interdomain lightpaths) and seek for a mutual agreement with Nash bargaining [1]. Then, we design a mathematical model to describe the market as well as the brokers' behaviors in it. An effective algorithm is derived from the model to solve the Nash bargaining problem for allocating lightpath requests among the brokers. The proposed algorithm also addresses the resource collision during request provisioning and can achieve collision-free request allocation. Extensive simulations verify the effectiveness of our proposal.