Design of bandwidth guaranteed OpenFlow virtual networks using robust optimization

In this paper, we address the OpenFlow virtual network (VN) design problem. Unlike most of the existing approaches that directly performing bandwidth slicing on the physical networks, we take traffic uncertainly and statistical multiplexing into consideration. In our system, a user can specify the desired VN topology and the capacity for each virtual link (VL). The bandwidth descriptor for a VL consists of a pair of values for guaranteed bandwidth and upper limit bandwidth. Each user is guaranteed to own the guaranteed bandwidth at any moment without interferences from the bandwidth usages of the other users. Moreover, a user can successfully uses bandwidth up to its upper limit in short time with packet loss probability no more than a pre-defined value. This feature enables OpenFlow networks to provide QoS for network services with bursty traffic. We model this problem as a robust optimization program to jointly determine admission control for VN and routing for VL. We further present an approach for implementing the proposed design using commercial available OpenFlow switches. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulations and experiments. The results indicate that the proposed design can successfully tolerate traffic uncertainly in OpenFlow networks. Since the proposed approach can use bandwidth with high efficiency, it can admit more VNs than the one without taking statistical multiplexing into consideration.