Deadline-Aware Multicast Transfers in Software-Defined Optical Wide-Area Networks

Abstract

The increasing amount of data replication across datacenters introduces a need for efficient bulk data transfer protocols which provide certain guarantees, most notably timely transfer completion. We present DaRTree which leverages emerging optical reconfiguration technologies, to jointly optimize topology and multicast transfers in software-defined optical Wide-Area Networks (WANs), and thereby maximize throughput and acceptance ratio of transfer requests subject to transfer deadlines. DaRTree is based on a novel integer linear program relaxation and deterministic rounding scheme. To this end, DaRTree uses Steiner trees for forwarding and adaptive routing based on the current network load. DaRTree provides transfer completion guarantees without the need for rescheduling or preemption. Our evaluations show that DaRTree increases the network throughput and the number of accepted requests by up to 1.7×, especially for larger WANs. Moreover, DaRTree even outperforms state-of-the-art solutions when the traffic demands are only unicast transfers or when the WAN topology cannot be reconfigured. While DaRTree determines the rate and route to serve a request at the time of (online) admission control, we show that the acceptance ratio and throughput can be improved by up to 1.3× even further when DaRTree updates the rate and route of admitted transfers also at runtime.