SDN-based resource allocation in MPLS networks: A hybrid approach

摘要

The highly dynamic nature of the current network trafficsmakes the network managers to exploitthe flexibility of the state-of-the-art paradigm called SDN. In this way, there has been an increasinginterest in hybrid networks of SDN-MPLS. In this paper, a new traffic engineering architecturefor SDN-MPLS network is proposed. To this end, OpenFlow-enabled switches are applied overthe edge of the network to improve flow-level management flexibility while MPLS routers areconsidered as the core of the network to make the scheme applicable for existing MPLS networks.The proposed scheme re-assigns flows to the Label-Switched Paths (LSPs) to highly utilizethe network resources. In the cases that the flow-level re-routing is insufficient, the proposedscheme re-computes and re-creates the undergoing LSPs. To this end, we mathematically formulatetwo optimization problems, ie, i) flow re-routing and ii) LSP re-creation, and propose aheuristic algorithm to improve the performance of the scheme. Our experimental results showthe efficiency of the proposed hybrid SDN-MPLS architecture in traffic engineering superiorstraditionally deployed MPLS networks.