SDN enabled restoration with triggered precomputation in elastic optical inter-datacenter networks

Flexi-grid elastic optical networks (EONs) provide a promising infrastructure for meeting the high-bandwidth and low-latency requirements of interconnecting datacenters. Since failures of high-capacity fiber links prevent users from accessing cloud services and lead to large amounts of data loss, much recent research has focused on inter-datacenter network failure recovery. In this paper, we build upon software-defined networking (SDN) technology and develop a fast restoration strategy with triggered precomputation (FR-TP) that achieves fast failure recovery with minimal resource overhead. Our work makes several contributions. We extend the controller functionality and OpenFlow protocol for software-defined elastic optical inter-datacenter network architectures, so as to obtain the global network state information quickly and accurately. We then present the FR-TP strategy and an associated trigger mechanism to compute backup paths before a link failure occurs. Furthermore, to improve the efficiency of path computation and bandwidth resource assignment, we construct a layered auxiliary graph of spectrum window planes (SWP-LAG) using a residual capacity matrix to change dynamically the width of the spectrum window planes (SWPs) to satisfy different service requests. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with existing restoration strategies, the proposed FR-TP strategy combined with SWP-LAG reduces the recovery time by up to 30.4% in the network topologies studied without increasing the blocking probability.