Experimental demonstration of time-aware software defined networking for OpenFlow-based optical interconnect in intra-datacenter networks

Due to the high burstiness and high-bandwidth characteristics of the services, optical interconnect in intra-datacenter networks has attracted much attention. Many datacenter applications in the environment require lower delay and higher availability with the end-to-end guaranteed quality of service. In this paper, we propose a novel time-aware software defined networking (TaSDN) architecture for OpenFlow-based optical interconnect in intra-datacenter networks, by introducing a time-aware service scheduling (TaSS) strategy. TaSDN can arrange and accommodate the applications with required QoS considering the time factor, and enhance the responsiveness to quickly provide for intra-datacenter demand. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture are experimentally verified on our testbed with real OpenFlow-enabled tunable optical modules.