Enhancing network resources utilization and resiliency in multi-domain bandwidth on demand service provisioning using SDN

This paper presents a solution to increase bandwidth utilization and to reduce the time necessary to recover from network failures in multi-domain bandwidth on demand service provisioning. The proposed solution is based on software-defined networking (SDN) in order to implement novel traffic engineering (TE) techniques. In fact, most standards development organizations and researchers agree that the logically centralized control plane and high programmability of SDN can revolutionize TE with novel and powerful strategies. In this context, the dynamic path computation (DynPaC) framework, relies on the OpenFlow SDN protocol to provide resilient layer 2 services with bandwidth guarantees within OpenFlow domains. In order to make DynPaC support multi-domain service provisioning, it has been extended with an additional operational mode and REST API calls, making it fully compliant with the Network Services Interface-Connection Service protocol. In this way, DynPaC can behave as a network resource manager (NRM) in the network services framework. As a result, the presented solution is the first OpenFlow-enabled NRM with resiliency capabilities that implements novel TE strategies that enhance the utilization of network resources. In order to validate the proposal, it has been implemented using the ONOS network operating systems and several tests have been conducted using diverse service demand patterns. The obtained results show that DynPaC is suitable to be used as an NRM and that the number of accepted services increases thanks to the flow reallocation mechanism included in the framework, achieving in this way a better utilization of network resources.