Time-aware Software Defined Networking for OpenFlow-based Datacenter Optical Networks

Data center networks are considered to make use of the computing and storage resources in data centers, which include intra-datacenter and inter-datacenter networks. Both of them will depend on the optical networking due to its advantages, such as low latency, high bandwidth, and low energy consumption. Data center interconnected by flexi-grid optical networks is a promising scenario to allocate spectral resources for applications in a dynamic, tunable and efficient control manner. Due to the high burstiness and high-bandwidth characteristics of the services, optical interconnect in intra-datacenter networks has attracted much attention compared with inter-datacenter network. Many datacenter applications in the environment require lower delay and higher availability with the end-to-end guaranteed quality of service. In this paper, we propose a novel time-aware software defined networking (TaSDN) architecture for OpenFlow-based datacenter optical networks, by introducing a time-aware service scheduling (TaSS) strategy. TaSDN can arrange and accommodate the applications with required QoS considering the time factor, and enhance the responsiveness to quickly provide for datacenter demand. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture are experimentally verified on our testbed with OpenFlow-based intra-datacenter and inter-datacenter optical networks.