A fully SDN enabled all-optical architecture for data centre virtualisation with time and space multiplexing

Abstract

Virtual Data Centre (VDC) solutions provide an environment that is able to quickly scale-up and where virtual machines and network resources can be quickly added on-demand through self-service procedures. VDC providers must support multiple simultaneous tenants with isolated networks on the same physical substrate. The provider must make efficient use of their available physical resources whilst providing high bandwidth and low-latency connections to tenants with a variety of VDC configurations. This paper utilises state of the art optical network elements to provide high bandwidth optical interconnections and develop an VDC architecture to slice the network and the compute resources dynamically, to efficiently divide the physical network between tenants. We present a Data Centre Virtualisation architecture with an SDN-controlled all-optical data plane combining Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) and Time Shared Optical Network (TSON). Developed network orchestration dynamically translates and provisions VDCs requests onto the optical physical layer. The experimental results show the provisioned bandwidth can be varied by adjusting the number of time slots allocated in the TDM network. These results lead to recommendations for provisioning TDM connections with different performance characteristics. Moreover, application level optical switch reconfiguration time is also evaluated to fully understand the impact on application performance in VDC provision. The experimental demonstration confirmed the developed VDC approach introduces negligible delay and complexity on the network side.