Extension of the Flow-Aware Networking (FAN) architecture to the IP over WDM environment

Backbone networks are migrating to IP over WDM architectures. In such multi-layer network configurations, it is necessary to combine efficiently the resources of both layers in order to provide enhanced quality of service (QoS) to the end-users. In the context of existing IP networks, flow-aware networking (FAN) has been proposed in order to provide QoS guarantees to multiplexed IP flows within an IP router. FAN is based on implicit admission control and per-flow scheduling. In this paper, we propose a new node architecture that extends the FAN concept to IP over WDM overlayed networks in which both optical and electronic resources are available. Three different policies are introduced to decide on which criteria an IP flow arriving at a node must be bifurcated from the standard FAN architecture to be forwarded onto a transparent lightpath up to its destination. The performance of the three proposed policies are discussed in terms of goodput and of queueing delay.