Online Survivability in Software Defined Elastic Optical Networks

Abstract

With the high and varying demands for network bandwidth, Elastic Optical Networks (EON), as a promising solution for future optical transport networks, have been getting increased attention due to its flexibility and efficiency. As a huge amount of data is transformed over these networks, even short failures will lead to major data loss. Network survivability is, thus especially crucial in EON. Two main criteria for evaluating the survivability performance of optical transport networks are recovery time and resource efficiency. Taking resource efficiency into consideration, we propose a multiple-backup-path protection scheme for traffic over super-channels which is the trend in EON. As the proposed multiple-backup-path protection scheme is more suitable for traffic over super-channels, we classify the traffic based on their bandwidth requirements. For different classes, we propose a survivability scheme named Hybrid Single and Multiple Backup Protection (HSMBP), which combines the single and multiple path backup protection.
Because Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an ideal architecture that allows easy control and flexibility of EON, we realize HSMBP under its architecture. Furthermore, we test this hybrid scheme in reference networks online and compared to other two protection schemes. Our simulation results show that HSMBP can effectively improve the network performance by reducing Bandwidth Blocking Probability (BBP).