Global load-balancing ONU assignment for a software-defined reconfigurable PON

Rapidly growing and fluctuating traffic demands lead to unbalanced traffic scenarios in optical access networks, which have an impact on network efficiency. Thus, the flexible software-defined reconfigurable passive optical network (PON) architecture has been proposed to handle this challenge. To improve the efficiency of a reconfigurable PON facing unbalanced traffic demands, this paper proposes a global load-balancing (GLB) optical network unit (ONU) assignment method, which aims to achieve load balancing among the optical line terminals (OLTs) in the OLT pool as well as among the aggregation switch ports that connect the OLTs by optimizing the affiliations between the OLTs and the ONUs. For on-line optimization, a greedy GLB algorithm is introduced that regroups the ONUs and generates load-balanced target ONU-OLT affiliations in accordance with dynamic traffic demands. For off-line optimization, bee colony optimization (BCO) is invoked to search for better ONU regrouping solutions for GLB. Simulation results show that the proposed GLB algorithm can significantly improve the throughput and delay performance of an optical access network faced with unbalanced traffic demands, especially when the network load is heavy. Moreover, the proposed BCO technique for GLB can obviously improve the worst delay performance and reduce the migrated traffic of the GLB solution, especially under network conditions with high peer-to-peer traffic proportions and heavy network loads. Thus, the proposed global load-balancing ONU assignment method is effective for helping a software-defined reconfigurable PON to cope with unbalanced traffic demands.