Dynamic Light Path Establishment In switch Fabric Using OpenFlow

Abstract

In today’s optical networks, Light paths are established through Network Management System and Element Management System, which is a manual and cumbersome process. Paths are computed and pre-setup according to the known traffic d emands, a nd p rovisioning a ny new service takes time. Several efforts have recently been made to make the path establishment process dynamic, including the Software Defined N etworking a pproach. H owever all of this work has assumed fully interconnected fabrics of the network devices which is generally not the case. The task of end to end path establishment between network elements and through fabric are interrelated, and this task remains incomplete, without consideration of the switch’s limitations. This work highlights for the first time the issue of path establishment dynamically through a switch fabric. The paper briefly e xplains t he p roblem a nd s uggests an SDN based solution using the OpenFlow protocol. This work contributes a represention of the basic framework which will be required to make the complete path setup process dynamic. The paper also includes an operational description.