Autonomic management of MPLS backbone networks using SDNs

Abstract

In MPLS backbone networks, network management complexity is rapidly increasing with the massive increase in network traffic. In addition, fast service creation and seamless failure recovery are highly desired operational requirements for many of the future safety and medical IoT services. On the other hand, Autonomic Network Management tends to be a very promising solution for most of the current network management challenges. In this paper, we tackle the problem of building an autonomic MPLS backbone network using SDNs. We have implemented a framework “OpenSP” as a prototype of the idea. Network operators are supposed to enter the service requirements from the customer point of view and OpenSP will take care of different network management tasks like forwarding rules generation, traffic engineering and failure recovery. Simulation results show a great enhancement in terms of the reduction of the network management complexity and the increase of the network efficiency.