A multi-domain control scheme for diffserv QoS and energy saving consideration in software-defined flexible optical networks

The software-defined networking has emerged as an efficient network technology. It is capable of supporting the dynamic nature of future network functions and intelligent applications to provide the customized services. However, the physical impairments are still the main factor affecting the transmission quality of the signal. Meanwhile, the future network design should also take the growing energy consumption into account. To address the above issues, we first present an impairment-energy aware control plane for single domain management based on the extended OpenFlow protocol in software-defined flexible optical networks. Then, a service-oriented multi-domain control scheme is designed for the network scalability requirement. To implement our scheme, a multi-domain quality of transmission (QoT) and energy aware routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) algorithm is proposed for the diffserv quality of service (QoS) and energy saving consideration. The experimental works validate that our proposed RSA scheme makes a better balance between the QoT and the energy efficiency and also improves the spectrum resources utilization with the acceptable average set up delay.