Research on Unified Control Plane Design for Multi-layer Optical Networks

Abstract

A unified control plane is necessary to be designed for multi-layer optical networks, especially for IP over WDM networks to improve the performance and efficiency of the entire networks. According to the advantages of PCE, a PCE-based unified control plane framework is designed. This paper mainly focuses on the framework of PCE-based unified control plane, and proposes a novel PCE-based traffic grooming strategy in the unified control plane to reduce the collision of resource in distributed control plane. Based on this strategy, four PCE-based traffic grooming algorithms are proposed and compared with the distributed traffic grooming strategy without PCE on a simulation platform implemented using disperse event simulation tool OMNeT++. On the other hand, power consumption problem in optical networks, especially in IP over WDM optical networks, becomes rigorous, and attracts more and more attentions, and power consumption model is the key to solve the power consumption problem. In this paper, power consumption model based on different service LSPs is built for IP over WDM optical networks. A power-aware traffic grooming algorithm is proposed and compared with two traditional traffic grooming algorithms on the NSFNET topology. Numeric results show that the power-aware traffic grooming can get low power consumption without increasing the blocking probability.