SDN-based control and orchestration of optical data centre networks

Abstract

The use of the Internet is linked with the constant technological change that the world is suffering nowadays, which is responsible for the important need to update the infrastructure of current data centers. The amount of traffic that is moving in data centers has increased significantly in the past few years, so a better alternative for them should be studied, as the use of Ethernet or InfiniBand is no longer appropriate in terms of scalability and flexibility. Optical technology is one possible solution for it, as it provides a big bandwidth, low latency and an overall better performance. However, the physical resources that form a data center should be managed in an efficient way. To perform an optimum use of them, the new concept of virtual data center appeared, where the orchestration of the resources is done with the aim of offering to a cloud infrastructure to a third party. In this context, OpenStack has become one of the most popular open source platforms when building public or private clouds, based on three important aspects: compute, storage and network. But the flexibility of these cloud infrastructures is attached to being scalable or dynamic. In this case, Software Definiton Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) play an important role in data centers, as they allow to build complex network capabilities on demand. In this project, we experimentally demonstrate the programmable OPsquare data center network empowered by an SDN control plane. The implementation is based on monitoring the real-time statistics of the network, so some actions such as network slices provisioning and reconfiguration, packet priority class assignment or dynamic load balancing operations can be done in order to achieve the required Quality of Service level. This project is a cooperation between TU/e (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) and UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona).