Cross-layer shared protection strategy towards data plane in software defined optical networks

In order to ensure reliable data transmission on the data plane and minimize resource consumption, a novel protection strategy towards data plane is proposed in software defined optical networks (SDON). Firstly, we establish a SDON architecture with hierarchical structure of data plane, which divides the data plane into four layers for getting fine-grained bandwidth resource. Then, we design the cross-layer routing and resource allocation based on this network architecture. Through jointly considering the bandwidth resource on all the layers, the SDN controller could allocate bandwidth resource to working path and backup path in an economical manner. Next, we construct auxiliary graphs and transform the shared protection problem into the graph vertex coloring problem. Therefore, the resource consumption on backup paths can be reduced further. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protection strategy can achieve lower protection overhead and higher resource utilization ratio.