On the quality of selfish virtual topology reconfiguration in IP-over-WDM networks

The process of planning a virtual topology for a Wavelength Devision Multiplexing (WDM) network is called Virtual Topology Design (VTD). The goal of VTD is to find a virtual topology that supports forwarding the expected traffic without congestion. In networks with fluctuating, high traffic demands, it can happen that no single topology fits all changing traffic demands occurring over a longer time. Thus, during operation, the virtual topology has to be reconfigured. Since modern networks tend to be large, VTD algorithms have to scale well with increasing network size, requiring distributed algorithms. Existing distributed VTD algorithms, however, react too slowly on congestion for the real-time reconfiguration of large networks. We propose Selfish Virtual Topology Reconfiguration (SVTR) as a new algorithm for distributed VTD. It combines reconfiguring the virtual topology and routing through a Software Defined Network (SDN). SVTR is used for online, on-the-fly network reconfiguration. Its integrated routing and WDM reconfiguration keeps connection disruption due to network reconfiguration to a minimum and is able to react very quickly to traffic pattern changes. SVTR works by iteratively adapting the virtual topology to the observed traffic patterns without global traffic information and without future traffic estimations. We evaluated SVTR by simulation and found that it significantly lowers congestion in realistic networks and high load scenarios.