Design of a routing scheme for bulk data transfers in multi-domain SnF OCS networks

Abstract

Rapid growth of overloaded traffic leads to bottlenecks on inter-domain links. There may not be sufficient bandwidth for end-to-end transmission upon the arrival of transfer bulk data requests. Storage can be introduced into the forwarding path so that the delay tolerant data can be temporarily stored and forwarded when network links become less congested. In this paper, we study the Store-and-Forward (SnF) problem in a multi-domain environment. We present a routing scheme based on a framework named TS-MLG (time-shifted multilayer graph) to perform inter-domain bulk data transfer by taking both spatial and temporal aspects into consideration. With this scheme, the cross-domain routing path with storage and transmission information, can be determined through conventional routing computations. An updating strategy is proposed to realize temporal bandwidth information exchange between physical and logical layers. Numerical simulations reveal that SnF can improve the inter-domain bandwidth utilization and optimize the network performance at the practical cost of maintenance overhead and computational complexity.