Joint architecture of data and control planes for Optical Flow Switched networks

In Optical Flow Switched networks, the control plane manages the data plane, performs scheduling, reconfigures the network, etc. For large wide area networks the scale of the data plane and the stochastic nature of the requests pose big challenges in achieving both data plane responsiveness/efficiency and control plane scalability which are coupled. In this work, we give an overview of the control functions and a scheduling algorithm for an OFS network. We consider two possible WAN lightpath topology architectures: meshed or tunneled. We use the blocking probability and throughput of the data plane to provide a common platform for the performance comparison of the designs of the control plane and algorithm complexity. With high traffic demands, the tunneled architecture provides comparable data plane performance as the meshed architecture but requires much less network management and control traffic and processing complexity and is thus much more scalable to large networks.