Software-defined networking enabled optical data center network with flexible QoS provisioning

Switching the traffic in optical domain has the potential to build the optical data center networks (DCNs) with fast switching and high capacity, overcoming thus the bandwidth-bottleneck of conventional electrically switched DCNs. The rapidly increasing multi-tenant applications in DCNs with heterogeneous traffic pattern requires flexible quality of service (QoS) to the network infrastructure. Network Slices (NS) is a promising solution to automatically slice the optical DCNs to support dynamic slicing interconnections in provision of flexible QoS. In this work, a Software-defined networking (SDN) enabled optical DCN is proposed and experi-mentally investigated with flexible QoS provisioning for the deployed multi-tenant applications. The proposed SDN enabled optical DCN, based on the monitored network topology and statistics, can be automatically sliced and reconfigured under the management of SDN controller. Experimental result validates the flexible priority allocation to NS traffic flows can provide dynamic QoS. In addition, the automatic operation of load balancing based on the monitored network statistics further improves the network performance with high QoS. At a load of 0.5, zero packet loss and lower than 4.8 mu s end-to-end latency have been demonstrated for the NS with highest priority.