Time-sensitive software-defined networking (Ts-SDN) control architecture for flexi-grid optical networks with data center application

Data center interconnected by flexi-grid optical networks is a promising scenario to meet the high burstiness and high bandwidth requirement of data center application, because flexi-grid optical networks can allocate spectral resources for applications in a dynamic, tunable and efficient control manner. Meanwhile, as centralized control architecture, the software-defined networking (SDN) enabled by OpenFlow protocol can provide maximum flexibility for the networks and make a unified control over various resources for the joint optimization of data center and network resources. Time factor is firstly introduced into SDN-based control architecture for flexi-grid optical networks supporting data center application. A traffic model considering time factor is proposed, and a requirement parameter, i.e., bandwidth-period product is adopted for the service requirement measurement. Then, time-sensitive software-defined networking (Ts-SDN)-based control architecture is designed with OpenFlow protocol extension. A novel deadline-driven PCE algorithm is proposed for the deadline-driven service under Ts-SDN-based control architecture, which can complete data center selection, path computation and bandwidth resource allocation. Finally, simulation results shows that our proposed Ts-SDN control architecture and deadline-driven PCE algorithm can improve the application and network performance to a large extent in blocking probability.