ONDM 2013 Brest, France
QoS-Aware Optical Burst Switching In OpenFlow
Based Software-Defined Optical Networks
Ankitkumar N. Patel, Philip N. Ji, and Ting Wang
NEe Laboratories America, Inc., Princeton, NJ 08540
Email: apatel@nec-labs.com.pji@nec-labs.com.ting@nec-labs.com
Abstract-OBS over WSON is one of the promising paradigms
for future optical networks, which offers statistical multiplexing
over high speed optical networks while eliminating electronic
bottlenecks. In such legacy IPIWDM networks, control planes
at IP and WDM layers are independently operated and man­
aged, which may not optimize network performance. Recently,
OpenFlow-based Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture
is introduced, which enables unified control protocols for multi­
layer networks to improve network agility and automation while
reducing capital and operational expenditures. In this paper,
we introduce a Software Defined Optical Network (SDON)
architecture and develop a QoS-aware unified control protocol
for optical burst switching in OpenFlow-based software-defined
optical networks. A novel adaptive-burst assembling algorithm,
a latency-aware burst routing and scheduling algorithm, and
an effective OpenFlow-based signaling protocol are investigated.
The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated with a
well-known GMPLS-based distributed protocol. The proposed
QoS-aware unified control protocol significantly improves burst
blocking, network throughput, and packet latency while offering
better quality of service (QoS) to different classes of traffic
with heterogeneous delay requirements compared to the GMPLS­
based distributed protocol.
Index Terms-Software-defined networks, OpenFlow protocol,
Optical burst switching, QoS, Distributed protocol, Throughput
I. INTRODUCTION
Network traffic is growing exponentially over time while
a revenue per unit time remains almost constant for most
network operators due to the fixed charging policies to end
users. In such scenarios, to sustain stable businesses, network
operators need to reduce capital and operational expenditures
of the network infrastructure. In today's commercial IP over
WDM multi-layer networks, IP and WDM layers are operated
and managed by separate divisions that leads to redundancy
in network operations and resource allocations. For example,
survivability at an IP layer is in-built within IP routing.
Offering optical layer survivability on top of the IP layer over­
provisions network resources. Furthermore, network resource
provisioning across multi-layers is not optimized when each
layer is optimized in an isolation. The impacts of events,
such as failures and network upgrades, cannot be detected and
mapped across independent control layers causing higher net­
work maintenance and diagnosis complexities. These problems
can be addressed by a unified control plane that converges the
control, management, and operations of multiple layers with
different switching granularity. Generalized Multi-protocol La­
bel Switching (GMPLS) is one such distributed unified control
plane protocol that has been extensively investigated in the
past; however, this protocol is overcomplicated. In spite of an
existence of mature GMPLS technologies, network operators
275
are reluctant in deploying such technologies in commercial
networks. Furthermore, GMPLS is defined just over existing
IPIMPLS networks and may not be capable of incorporating
everything in a homogeneous protocol suite [1]. Thus, GMPLS
may not offer unified control plane infrastructure for future
optical networks.
Recently, a software-defined network architecture is intro­
duced in which a control plane is extracted from the data
plane of a physical hardware, and this control plane resides in
a centralize controller. A centralized controller communicates
with the data plane of physical hardware through an open
protocol such as OpenFlow. The protocol extracts a common
set of functionalities for heterogeneous switching granularity
across multiple layers. The control plane decisions taken by
the controller are represented in terms of a set of actions,
rules, and policies those are cached in a data plane, and
thus, the same data plane can support heterogeneous protocols
and switching granularity. On the other hand, the controller
abstracts the common-map of data planes across multiple
layers while hiding the implementation details, and thus, offers
virtualization. Therefore, an SDN architecture enables con­
trol protocols those can simultaneously manage, control, and
operate multiple layers with heterogeneous switching granu­
larity. Such architecture enables more flexibility in hardware
selections, shorter time to implement new technologies and
products, more efficient and reliable automatic unified control,
and optimized utilization of network resources.
Optical WDM networks mainly supports circuit, packet,
and burst switching technologies. Among them optical circuit
switching offers course switching granularity, and has large
round trip latency in a connection setup. Optical packet
switching has a large buffer requirement, complicated control,
stringent synchronization requirements [2], and the technolo­
gies to support optical packet switching are still immature.
On the other hand, Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a
promising technology for future optical networks, which of­
fers an intermediate solution by leveraging the benefits of
both optical circuit and packet switching such as statistical
multiplexing over high-speed optical transmission. OBS offers
finer switching granularity of traffic with lower complexity and
higher resource efficiency. Recently, Zhang et. al. develop an
OpenFlow-based OBS protocol for software-defined networks,
and demonstrate its feasibility through experiments [3]. How­
ever, to the best of our knowledge, the technological benefits
achieved through an OpenFlow-based SDN architecture are
not yet investigated for optical burst switched networks.
In this paper, we introduce a Software Defined Optical
 ONDM 2013 Brest, France
Optics Defining Controller (ODC)
Debugger and Manager
Network Operating System
Open Interface
Network Hypervisor
Fig. 1. SDON Architecture
Network (SDON) architecture and design a QoS-aware unified
control protocol to support OBS over SDONs. Our contribu­
tion in this paper is of four fold; (1) a novel burst assembling
algorithm is proposed, which adapts a burst size on-the­
fly based on a network state and the latency requirements
of applications, and (2) a latency-aware burst routing and
scheduling algorithm is designed, which can optimize the
scheduling of a burst based on the latency requirements of
applications, (3) a novel OpenFlow-based signaling protocol
is designed to setup OBS connections, and (4) potentials of
the SDON architecture are demonstrated in optical networks
by evaluating the proposed protocol with GMPLS-based dis­
tributed OBS protocol.
The rest of the paper is organized as follow. In Section II,
we introduce a software-defined optical network architecture.
The QoS-aware unified control protocol is proposed in Section
III. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated in
Section IV, and finally, we conclude the study in Section V.
II. SOFTWARE-DEFINED OPTICAL NETW ORK
A RCHITECTURE
Optical transport offers high capacity and long-reach trans­
mission with low impairments compared to electrical trans­
port networks. Thus, optical transport is more scalable than
electrical one. Many of the optical signal operations such as
combining, splitting, and filtering are passive. Additionally,
all-optical transmissions eliminate the requirements of elec­
trical processing at nodes. Thus, optical transport consumes
much less power than electrical transport networks. Therefore,
adding optical transport networks to OpenFlow-based SDN [4]
provides higher capacity, higher scalability, and lower power
consumption while converging cross-layer packet-circuit hy­
brid SDN. However, many electrical SDN technologies may
not directly be applicable to optical SDN technologies due to
the differences in switching technologies, the media of data
transmission, and control plane constraints.
Here, we introduce a software defined optical network
architecture [5] that has similar features as IPlEthernet-based
electrical SDN architecture in which a control plane is ex­
tracted from the data plane of a physical device, and most
network control and management intelligence resides in a
centralized controller. The centralized controller controls net­
work equipments using an open standardized protocol such
276
as OpenFlow over standardized programmable-interfaces. Net­
work equipments are equipped with software programmable
modules, which offers higher level of flexibility under the
observance of a controller.
Figure 1 illustrates the proposed software defined optical
network architecture that mainly consists of two elements;
(l) software-defined optics (SDO) and (2) Optics defining
controller (ODC). Software defined optics consists of physical
hardware such as transmitter, receiver, modulator, switching
node, amplifiers, and so on, which are software programmable
to perform flexible operations, such as variable modulation for­
mat transmission, reconfigurable colorless, directionless, and
contentionless add/drop, elastic spectrum switching, flexible
bandwidth multiplexing, concurrent multiple impairment com­
pensation and mitigation, and many more. These hardware and
their features establish the foundation of SDON's optimization
and customization capabilities.
Optics defining controller manages the network, and per­
forms network optimization and customization to utilize flex­
ibility of SDO. ODC functionalities are further extracted into
network hypervisor, operating system, network applications,
and debugger and management planes. These planes are iso­
lated by open standardized interfaces to allow simultaneous
and rapid innovations at each layer independently. Various
control plane functionalities, for example, routing and resource
allocation, access control, QoS management, protection and
restoration, defragmentation, energy optimization, etc., are
installed as network applications in the ODe. Network hyper­
visor offers virtualization by providing isolation and sharing
functions to a data plane as well as an abstract view of
networks while hiding physical layer implementation details
to a controller in order to optimize and simplify the network
operations. Operating system offers a progranunable platform
for the execution of network applications and network hy­
pervisor. Debugger and management plane monitors network
performance and performs fault isolation, localization, and
recovery.
Network elements, SDO and ODC, consist of open stan­
dardized interfaces and communicate with each other using
open protocols, such as OpenFlow. Standardized open inter­
faces and protocols provide an environment in which control
applications and physical hardware developed by different
vendors can be operable and controlled.
III. QOS-AWARE UNIFIED CONTROL PROTOCOL FOR OBS
In this section, we briefly explain the GMPLS based OBS
protocol and propose the QoS-aware OBS protocol for SDON
architecture in detail.
Optical burst switching protocol mainly requires three key
operations; burst assembling, burst routing and scheduling,
and control packet signaling. In GMPLS-based optical burst
switching protocol, an ingress edge node aggregates client
packets into a large burst. For each burst, a control packet is
formed consisting of the control related information such as
routing, assigned wavelength, and burst length. This control
packet is separated from the burst and sent along the route
 ONDM 2013 Brest, France
prior to an interval of an offset time. This control packet is
processed at each intermediate node to reserve wavelength
resources and configure optical cross-connects (OXCs) for
the interval of the burst arrival such that the burst can be
transmitted all-optically, and thus, the bottlenecks of electrical
processing are eliminated. The performance of OBS is highly
influenced by a burst assembling procedure, a burst routing
and scheduling procedure, and a control packet signaling
protocol. In the prior research, the proportional-QoS based
burst assembling algorithm [6], the source-based routing and
burst scheduling algorithm [7], and the JET-based signaling
protocol [8] have gained a lot of attentions. However, these
algorithms and protocol may not directly be applicable to the
centralized software-defined optical network architecture.
In SDON, a centralized controller is responsible for making
control plane decisions. The control decisions represented
in terms of actions, rules and policies are cached in the
flow tables [4] or cross-connect tables [1] of programmable
switches. A controller maintains the network state information,
such as network connectivity and wavelength occupancy in­
formation centrally. In the wavelength occupancy information,
time is slotted, and the state of each wavelength in a time
, if M < BMin or De < BMin
slot is represented by a binary variable; l' denotes that the
wavelength is available in a time slot, and 0 denotes that the
' '
wavelength is occupied.
In optical burst switching, upon formation of a burst at an
edge node, a burst establishment message is sent to a controller
using OpenFlow protocol over a secure dedicated channel. The
controller performs the burst routing, scheduling, and burst
estimation operations using the global network state informa­
tion. For the found solution, the controller caches the cross­
connection information of an optical circuit for a scheduled
time interval in the cross-connect tables of all nodes along
the selected route using the burst configuration messages, and
simultaneously informs the estimated burst size and the burst
release time to the source edge node using the burst release
message. Upon acceptance of a burst release message from
the controller, an edge node forwards the burst all-optically
to the destination edge node. These operations require an
enhancement of OpenFlow protocol and developments of burst
assembling, routing, and scheduling applications in a con­
troller to offer OBS functionalities over SDON. The proposed
QoS-aware unified control protocol consists of adaptive-burst
assembling, latency-aware burst routing and scheduling, and
OpenFlow based signaling those are described as follows.
A. Adaptive-Burst Assembling Algorithm
Various applications have heterogeneous latency require­
ments. For example, voice-over-IP, online gaming, video con­
ference, and IPTV applications require smaller packet latency
compared to email, online backups, and software download
applications. An edge node classifies these traffic into different
Forwarding Equivalent Classes (FECs) based on their latency
requirements. In the past, many QoS provisioning policies
have been investigated to form and treat each class of traffic
separately [6], [9]. However, these schemes are executed only
277
at edge nodes those do not have the global knowledge of
network states.
In the proposed adaptive-burst assembling procedure, bursts
are assembled at edge nodes while the burst size is estimated
at the controller. The controller estimates the burst size based
on the available network resources and the latency requirement
Le of a traffic class C. Let Z denotes the burst configuration
time that is defined as Z = (2 x T� x D�) + ToDe +
Toxe, where T� denotes OpenFlow control message prop­
agation latency per unit distance, D� denotes the distance
between a controller and an edge node, ToDC is control
packet processing time at ODC, and Toxe is an upper bound
of optical cross-connect configuration time. Thus, the burst
configuration time is independent of the route length. The
procedure constraints a burst size between BMin and BMax,
where BMin and BMax denote the minimum and maximum
allowed burst size respectively, since very small burst size
increases the control plane overhead while very large burst
size may not be supported at edge nodes due to the buffer
capacity limitations. Let, Be denotes the estimated burst size.
Algorithm 111.1: ADAPTIVE BURST ESTIMATION(De, M)
{
then { Be +- BMin
else if !vI > BMax and De > BMax
then Be +- BMax
if M < De
else then { Be +- M
else { Be +- De
return ( Be )
The controller first estimates a burst size based on the
network state information. The procedure precalculates K­
shortest routes between each source-destination pair. For a
given OBS connection between a pair of edge nodes, the
procedure finds the bit-map of each wavelength along the K­
alternate shortest routes connecting the pair of edge nodes.
The bit-map of a wavelength along a route is derived by
performing bitwise logical-end operations on the bit-maps of
the same wavelength in all links along the route. In the found
bit-maps, a set of void islands X are searched in a time interval
Z � t � Le, where a void island is defined as a set of
unoccupied consecutive time slots. If the average size of the
found void islands X is denoted as SAvg, then M SApV9XY
A'vg
=
denotes the estimated burst size based on the network state
information, where Y and PAvg denote channel capacity per
unit time slot and an average packet size respectively. M
is selected based on the fact that an availability of a void
island with an average size is highly likely in the near future
compared to that with the maximum island size. The controller
also estimates a burst size based on the application latency
requirements. If the packets of class C are buffered since
Le Z units of time or in other words the buffered packets
-
of class C are just the configuration time away by meeting
their latency requirements, then the burst size is estimated to
be the size of class C buffer denoted as Dc.
As shown in Algorithm 111.1, if both the estimated burst
sizes, M and Dc are greater than BMax, then the procedure
 ONDM 2013 Brest, France
returns the burst size BMax. On the contrary, if either M
or De is smaller than BMin, then the procedure returns the
burst size BMin. If both, M and De are in between BMin
and BMax, then the procedure returns the smallest estimated
burst size among M and De. The controller piggybacks the
estimated burst size of class C with the burst release message
that is sent to a source edge node. The source edge node
generates the next burst of this estimated size for class C,
and piggybacks the current buffer state information of class
C, such as the buffer size and the waiting time of the oldest
buffered packet with the burst establishment message sent to
the controller. Thus, the burst size is adapted based on the
network state and the latency requirements of applications.
B. Latency-Aware Burst Routing and Scheduling Algorithm
This procedure considers the network state information
and application latency requirements in determining the burst
routing and scheduling while observing the wavelength conti­
nuity constraint. Here, we assume that optical nodes are not
equipped with wavelength convertors and fiber delay lines,
and also ignore deflection routing in the events of burst
contentions. Thus, if the procedure fails to find all optical
end-to-end connection for the duration of a burst transmission,
then the burst is considered to be blocked. Let us consider for
class C 1,2,3, l traffic, and their latency requirements are
=
L1 < L2 < L3 < < Ll, then the latency-aware burst routing
and scheduling algorithm can be described as follows.
• Step 1: Construct the bit-map of each wavelength along
the precalculated K-alternate shortest routes connecting
the pair of end nodes by performing the bitwise logical­
end operations on the bit-maps of the same wavelength
in all links along the route.
• Step 2: The procedure finds a set of void islands those
have at least a width of Bp' in the bit-map of each
wavelength along the K-alternate shortest routes, and the
starting time slot of the found void island is recorded in
a set Q, where Bbst denotes a burst size.
• Step 3: Among the found void islands Q, a void island
is selected and returned for a traffic class C as follows.
minqEQ,q:'OL, ( q ) if C= 1
minqEQ,L,:'Oq:'OL2 ( q ) if C=2
maxqEQ,q:'OL, ( q ) if C=2
minqEQ,L2:'Oq:'OL3 ( q ) if C=3
maxqEQ,q:'OL2 ( q ) if C=3
minqEQ,Ll_,:'Oq:'OLI ( q ) if C= l
maxqEQ,q:'OL1_1 ( q ) if C= l
For burst routing, the procedure selects a route among the K­
alternate shortest routes to balance the load over the network
while avoiding over-provisioning of network resources. The
procedure finds the bit-maps of wavelengths along the K­
alternate routes. In the found bit-maps, void islands of at
least B.;;:" width are searched, and the starting time slots at
278
Fig. 2. QoS-Aware Unified Control Protocol
which the found void islands are available are recorded in
a set Q. Among the found void islands, a void island is
selected such that the probability of scheduling bursts with
lower latency requirements is maximized while satisfying the
latency requirement of the current burst.
C. OpenFlow Protocol Extensions
Here, we propose extensions to OpenFlow protocol to
realize QoS-aware unified control protocol for OBS switching.
In [1], the format of a cross-connect table is introduced,
which defines circuit flows based on time division multiple
access (TDMA), SONET/SDH, Virtual Concatenation switch­
ing, wavelength switching, and fiber switching. In OBS, such
circuits are established for predefined time intervals. In order
to explicitly specify OBS connections, circuit establishment
and termination time instances need to be included in the
cross-connect tables. Thus, a burst configuration message from
a controller to each core node along the route consists of
cross-connection entries with the scheduled establishment and
termination time instances. A burst establishment message
from an edge node to a controller incorporates parameters
such as burst length, source edge node, destination edge node,
QoS requirement, forwarding equivalent class (FEC), buffer
size of FEC at an edge node, and arrival time of the oldest
buffered packet of FEC at the edge node. On the other hand, a
burst release message from a controller to a source edge node
incorporates an offset time after which the burst needs to be
released and an estimated burst size Be for the future burst
transmissions of class C.
D. QoS-Aware Unified Control Protocol
In this section, we describe the QoS-aware unified protocol
for OBS switching (demonstrated in Fig 2) and summarized
as follows.
• Step 1: A source OBS edge node buffers packets with
different QoS requirements in different forwarding equiv­
alent classes. For each FEC C, a node maintains an
estimated burst size Be determined by a controller. When
the buffer size approaches to Be, an edge node generates
a burst of size Be.
• Step 2: A source node sends out a burst establishment
message to a controller in order to request an edge-to­
edge optical connection.
• Step 3: A controller finds the burst routing and scheduling
using the latency-aware burst routing and scheduling
 ONDM 2013 Brest, France
procedure. The controller also estimates a burst size
based on the network state information, QoS (latency)
requirements of applications, and the state of a queue
at the edge node using the adaptive burst assembling
procedure.
• Step 4: The controller sends the estimated burst size
along with a burst release message to the edge node,
and cross-connection entries for a scheduled time interval
with a burst configuration message to each core node
along the selected route.
• Step 5: Upon reception of the burst release message from
the controller, an edge router updates the estimated burst
size parameter Be for class C traffic. Upon reception
of the burst configuration message, the received cross­
connect entry for a scheduled duration is cached in the
cross-connect table of each node along the selected route,
and the core nodes are configured at the scheduled time
instance.
• Step 6: The burst is released at the schedule time from
the source edge node, and transported to the destination
edge node transparently.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
The QoS-aware unified OBS protocol is evaluated through a
custom-built event driven simulator. We consider 6-node mesh,
lO-node mesh, and 14-node NSF networks. Each fiber link is
assumed to have 10 wavelengths, and each wavelength offers
10 Gb/s line rate. Packet arrival distribution is Poisson with
mean arrival rate R. The size of each packet is assumed to be
10 KB. The network supports three classes of traffic; Class A,
Class B, and Class C, those arrive with probability 0.3, 0.3,
and 0.4 respectively among the cumulative arrival rate. The
latency requirements of Class A, Class B, and Class C traffic
are 100 msec, 150 msec, and 200 msec respectively. The upper
limit of OXC configuration time is assumed to be 10 msec.
The light propagation latency in the fiber is 0.005 msec/Km.
The latency-aware burst routing and scheduling algorithm is
evaluated by considering K 3 alternate shortest routes, and
= The packet latency for various classes of traffic is demon­
the adaptive burst assembling algorithm bounds the minimum
burst size of 500 packets and the maximum burst size of 2000
packets. Each traffic class is of type non-preemptive.
The QoS-aware unified OBS protocol is evaluated with the
conventional GMPLS-based distributed protocol that consists
of the proportional-QoS based burst assembling algorithm, the
source-based burst routing and scheduling algorithm, and the
JET-based signaling protocol. In the proportional-QoS based
burst assembling algorithm, a burst is released for a class of
traffic that has the maximum ratio of the current buffer size
and the latency requirement. If the buffered queue size is larger
than 2000 Packets, then a burst of maximum size is generated.
In the source-based routing and burst assembling algorithm,
the source node selects a route out of K-alternate shortest
routes on which a void island is available at the earliest starting
time slot based on the local network state information. Any
network event triggers OSPF protocol to update network state
information in the GMPLS-based distributed protocol.
279
Figure 3 evaluates burst blocking in the QoS-aware OBS
protocol and GMPLS-based distributed protocol as the packet
arrival rate increases for each class of traffic. The QoS­
aware OBS protocol improves the burst blocking by at least
50% for each class of traffic compared to the GMPLS­
based protocol. Such a significant performance improvement
is due the cumulative effects of the optimized adaptive burst
assembling procedure, the latency-aware burst routing and
scheduling procedure, and OpenFiow-based signaling pro­
tocol. The adaptive burst assembling algorithm takes into
account additional information such as the network state
and application latency requirements while forming a burst
compared to the proportional-QoS based burst assembling pro­
cedure that is rigid as shown in Fig 4. Figure 4 illustrates the
average burst size in the proportional-QoS based and adaptive
burst assembling algorithms. The adaptive burst assembling
algorithm intelligently adapts the burst size based on the
network load. At low load, the proposed procedure can find
sufficient network resources for a large burst size with high
probability. On the other hand, as the network load increases,
this likelihood decreases, and thus, the procedure decreased the
burst size with the load. On the contrary, the proportional-QoS
burst assembling algorithm always assembles a burst of the
same size irrespective of the network load and the application
latency requirements. In the latency-aware burst routing and
scheduling algorithm, routing and scheduling operations are
optimized based on the global network state information. On
the other hand, in the source-based routing and scheduling
algorithm, these operations are independently optimized at
each edge node based on the local network state information.
Thus, lack of up-to-date network state information in the
source-based routing and scheduling procedure contributes
higher blocking in the GMPLS-based distributed protocol.
Furthermore, the latency-aware burst routing and scheduling
algorithm finds a solution that satisfies the latency requirement
of each class of traffic while maximizing the probability of
provisioning low latency traffic.
strated in Fig. 5 as the network load increases. The QoS-aware
OBS protocol suffers from higher packet latency compared to
the GMPLS-based protocol since the bursts that are blocked in
GMPLS protocol are accepted in the QoS-aware OBS protocol
with higher latency. As shown in the Figure, the proposed
protocol meets the latency requirement of each class of traffic.
Furthermore, the OpenFlow-based signaling in the proposed
protocol reduces the burst configuration time compared to the
JET-based signaling in the GMPLS based distributed protocol
as shown in Fig. 6. Instead of sequential OXC configurations
in the distributed protocol, parallel OXC configurations in
OpenFlow based centralized protocol dramatically improves
the burst configuration time. Furthermore, the gain in the
configuration time increases with the network size. Thus, the
proposed protocol reduces the service provisioning time and
improves QoS offered to end users.
Figure 7 demonstrates the network throughput of the QoS­
aware OBS protocol and GMPLS-based distributed protocol as
 ONDM 201 3 Brest, France

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30 the GMPLS-based distributed proto col. The propo sed protocol
optimizes burst routing and scheduling, reduced burst setup
25
time, and optimizes burst formation based on the network state
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o In this work , we introdu ce the software defined optical
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Network size
evaluated with the conventional GMPLS-based distributed
Fig. 6. Configuration Time vs. Network
protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pro-
tocol optimizes the network performance in terms of network
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throughput, burst blocking probability, and packet latency
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---.
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