Experimental demonstration of elastic optical networks based on enhanced software defined networking (eSDN) for data center application

Due to the high burstiness and high-bandwidth characteristics of the applications, data center interconnection by elastic optical networks have attracted much attention of network operators and service providers. Many data center applications require lower delay and higher availability with the end-to-end guaranteed quality of service. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel elastic optical network based on enhanced software defined networking (eSDN) architecture for data center application, by introducing a transport-aware cross stratum optimization (TA-CSO) strategy. eSDN can enable cross stratum optimization of application and elastic optical network stratum resources and provide the elastic physical layer parameter adjustment, e.g., modulation format and bandwidth. We have designed and verified experimentally software defined path provisioning on our testbed with four real OpenFlow-enabled elastic optical nodes for data center application. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture is also experimentally demonstrated and compared with individual CSO and physical layer adjustment strategies in terms of path setup/release/adjustment latency, blocking probability and resource occupation rate.