Traffic Engineering in SDN/OSPF Hybrid Network

Abstract

Traffic engineering under OSPF routes along the shortest paths, which may cause network congestion. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture which exerts a separation between the control plane and the data plane. The SDN controller can centrally control the network state through modifying the flow tables maintained by routers. Network operators can flexibly split arbitrary flows to outgoing links through the deployment of the SDN. However, SDN has its own challenges of full deployment, which makes the full deployment of SDN difficult in the short term. In this paper, we explore the traffic engineering in a SDN/OSPF hybrid network. In our scenario, the OSPF weights and flow splitting ratio of the SDN nodes can both be changed. The controller can arbitrarily split the flows coming into the SDN nodes. The regular nodes still run OSPF. Our contribution is that we propose a novel algorithm called SOTE that can obtain a lower maximum link utilization. We reap a greater benefit compared with the results of the OSPF network and the SDN/OSPF hybrid network with fixed weight setting. We also find that when only 30% of the SDN nodes are deployed, we can obtain a near optimal performance.