Blockchain-enhanced cross-ISP spectrum assignment framework in SDONs: SpectrumChain

Abstract

Huge potentials of optical networks provide an excellent choice in meeting the exponential growth in bandwidth demand. In particular, Elastic Optical Networks (EONs), with its promising potentials in increased availability, failure resilience, load-balancing, and efficient resource allocations, are good candidates for the future high-speed networks. When EONs are augmented with the emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, which decouples the data and control planes, an agile and synergistic combination emerges under a general term of Software Defined Optical Networking (SDON), albeit with operational challenges such optimal and efficient spectrum assignments. In this paper, we present a blockchain-enhanced QoS-concentrated cross-Internet Service Provider (ISP) spectrum assignment framework for SDONs, SpectrumChain (SC), to eliminate centralized mediators while coordinating QoS-based inter-ISP traffic. This study introduces a new blockchain use-case with reduced QoS signaling overhead while performing inter-ISP routing in SDONs. We also experience the proposed framework under Hop-by-Hop Wavelength Switching (HWS), Border-Node-Only Wavelength Switching (BWS), and No Wavelength Switching (NWS) scenarios to analyze its performance. Our extensive simulation results show that the SC framework can effectively handle the QoS-enabled inter-ISP routing in SDON architecture in terms of Flow Setup Time (FST), Messages Processed (MEP), Requests Serviced (RS), and Acceptance Ratio (AR) metrics under HWS, BWS, and NWS scenarios.