Control plane implemented with dual-PCE and openflow controller in flexi-grid optical networks

OpenFlow, as an open-source protocol with prominent performance of networking virtualization and programmability, has been gradually introduced to act as a control plane technology in optical networks. However, with the increasing of the complexity of the network architecture and the service kinds, a centralized OpenFlow-based software-defined networking (SDN) control plane has a major drawback that its capacity is limited for processing the service requests in the scenario with high traffic intensity. In this paper, we propose a control plane architecture implemented with dual-PCE and OpenFlow controller to serve the dynamic services from a twofold computation abilities in flexi-grid optical network. We demonstrate the performance of this architecture by introducing the work procedures and coordination mechanisms of our control plane. Our numeric results show that when the traffic intensity is over 400 Erlang, the blocking probability declines about 45% comparing with the control plane integrated one PCE.