Multipath protection for data center services in OpenFlow-based software defined elastic optical networks

• We demonstrate multipath protection for services in OpenFlow-based testbed.
• Multipath protection scheme is figured based on the level of service.
• The performance of scheme is evaluated on our OpenFlow-based testbed.

With the rapid growth of data center services, the elastic optical network is a very promising networking architecture to interconnect data centers because it can elastically allocate spectrum tailored for various bandwidth requirements. In case of a link failure, to ensure a high-level quality of service (QoS) for user request after the failure becomes a research focus. In light of it, in this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate multipath protection for data center services in OpenFlow-based software defined elastic optical network testbed aiming at improving network reliability. We first propose an OpenFlow-based software defined elastic optical network architecture for data center service protection. Then, based on the proposed architecture, multipath protection scheme is figured based on the importance level of the service. To implement the proposed scheme in the architecture, OpenFlow protocol is extended to support multipath protection in elastic optical network. The performance of our proposed multipath protection scheme is evaluated by means of experiment on our OpenFlow-based testbed. The feasibility of our proposed scheme is also demonstrated in software defined elastic optical networks.