Flow scheduling in OBS networks based on software-defined networking control plane

Abstract

The separated management and operation of commercial IP/optical multilayer networks makes network operators look for a unified control plane (UCP) to reduce their capital and operational expenditure. Software-defined networking (SDN) provides a central control plane with a programmable mechanism, regarded as a promising UCP for future optical networks. The general control and scheduling mechanism in SDN-based optical burst switching (OBS) networks is insufficient so the controller has to process a large number of messages per second, resulting in low network resource utilization. In view of this, this paper presents the burst-flow scheduling mechanism (BFSM) with a proposed scheduling algorithm considering channel usage. The simulation results show that, compared with the general control and scheduling mechanism, BFSM provides higher resource utilization and controller performance for the SDN-based OBS network in terms of burst loss rate, the number of messages to which the controller responds, and the average latency of the controller to process a message.