Virtual Links Mapping in Future SDN-enabled Networks

Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as an efficient network technology for lowering operating costs through simplified hardware, software and management. Specific research focus has been placed to achieve a successful carrier grade network with SDN, in terms of scalability, reliability, QoS and service management. In the literature, very little material is currently available on traffic engineering (TE) using this technology. This paper presents a novel mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for a centralised controller to calculate optimal end-to-end virtual paths over the underlying network infrastructure, considering multiple requests simultaneously. Extensive simulation results, over a wide range of underlying network topologies and input parameters, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional shortest path first (SPF) approaches. In some cases, up to 30% more virtual connections were satisfactorily mapped onto the same substrate, independent of the number of physical nodes.