Resource management and control in converged optical data center networks: Survey and enabling technologies

In addition to the optical interconnection among servers for the Intra Data Center (IDC), the optical interconnection of geographically distributed data centers also becomes increasingly important since data centers are geographically distributed so that one data center maybe far away from another. So the converged Optical and Data Center Network (ODCN) emerges as the times require. In the ODCN, each optically interconnected IDC locates at the edge of the optical backbone. In this article, we first make an extensive survey on the resource management and control in the ODCN, and we find that: (1) for this new network paradigm, the intelligent coexistence of heterogeneous technologies should be considered because the ODCN will be required to satisfy diverse and highly dynamic network services; (2) the integrated virtualization of backbone bandwidth and computing resources should be performed for the resource management in ODCNs, with the objective to improve the underlying infrastructure utilization; (3) after performing the integrated virtualization, a set of virtual networks are generated, and each of them has virtual lightpaths and virtual machines. But a static virtual network merely satisfies a certain range of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and it merely adapts to a particular network status. When the SLA significantly varies or the Quality of Transmission (QoT) gets worse, it is necessary to trigger the dynamic planning for the virtual network reconfiguration; (4) to decrease the control overhead and the delay of making decisions for the dynamic planning, it is practical to embed a highly effective network control plane into intelligent ODCN. Consequently, we make a blueprint where we execute the intelligent coexistence, integrated virtualization and dynamic planning for the resource management in ODCNs. Some preliminary works and simulation results will guide the future work.