Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 30, Issue 5, 8 March 2007, Pages 1142-1151
Computer Communications

A distributed advance reservation system for interconnected slotted optical networks: Design and simulations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2006.12.001Get rights and content

Abstract

In inter-domain optical networks, the major issues are bandwidth management and fast service provisioning. The goal is to provide optical networks with intelligent networking functions and capabilities in its control plane to enable rapid optical connection provisioning, multiplexing, and switching at different granularity levels, especially wavelength and time slot. In this paper, we propose a new Distributed Advance Reservation System for Interconnected Optical networks (DARSION). DARSION supports advance resource reservation across multiple domains. The user specifies the service he/she requires, the start time of the reservation, and the duration of the reservation. DARSION provides the user with the resources that can be reserved at the start time and other times in the future carefully selected. This is in opposition to existing approaches that respond with either an acceptation or a rejection of the request. We performed simulations to evaluate the proposed system. The simulations results show lower user request blocking probability when using the proposed system.

Introduction

With the development being made in the networking technology, a new generation of applications (e.g., Grid applications, video-on-demand) is emerging, requiring more and more resources. Furthermore, these applications have different needs and may require specific quality of services (QoS). The network has to guarantee QoS parameters by reserving adequate resources to avoid variations of the transmission quality (i.e., degradation).

Optical networks deploying dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) [1], [2], [3] and time division multiplexing [4], [5], [6] are gathering more interest in research and industry. Their ability to establish connections between sources and destination with the exact amount of bandwidth make them a pioneer of another generation of backbone networks providing services like bandwidth on demand [7]. Unlike routed wavelength optical networks [8], [9], [10] where the bandwidth granularity is the whole wavelength, the time slotted optical networks use the concept of time slot. Thus, the resource reservation is based on time slots allocation.

To enable high scalability and large geographical coverage, many networks are connected together. Many protocols are developed [11], [12], to ease the communication between the different domains and provide reachability information. In this context, users submit connection requests only at the time when the connection should be established based on the information gathered by the inter-domain protocols. For each request, the network must decide immediately whether to accept or reject the request. However, with this model [13] there is always the uncertainty of whether the user will be able to establish the desired connection at the desired time; the user is provided with a limited choice which is either acceptation or rejection; indeed, the user is provided with no choice. Furthermore, it makes it difficult, or rather infeasible, for the network providers to minimize the blocking probability of the user requests (and thus increases its revenues) by rearranging/adjusting the resources allocation without degrading the agreed upon QoS; indeed, resources rearrangements usually require traffic rerouting which usually causes data losses.

To overcome this undesirable situation, there is a need (a) to support advance reservation [14], [15], [16] of time slots; and (b) to provide the user with more choices than the simple accept/reject choice. In this case, the user requests the allocation of a certain number of time slots at a given start time for a given duration. In response, the allocation manager checks resources availability across all the involved networks, computes, and presents the user with the number of time slots that can be reserved at the requested start time and a certain times in the future carefully selected. With this model, the agreed upon reservations between the user and the network provider are confirmed before the start time; the user is “guaranteed” that the requested service can take place at the desired time at the agreed upon QoS (i.e., number of time slots). However, if the user requirements cannot be met (because of shortage in resources) The user and the network provider have enough time to engage a negotiation to reach a mutual agreement on an another start time and number of times slots to be reserved for the requested duration.

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed reservation system for interconnected optical networks, called DARSION, which supports inter-domain advance reservation. DARSION consists of a number of ARMs (Advance Reservation Manager); each ARM is associated with one optical network. ARMs realize the resources reservation within their networks and coordinate with each other to realize the end-to-end resources reservation. The users generate requests, each specifying source and destination nodes, bandwidth requirements in terms of time slots, the starting time, and the duration. DARSION, via ARMs, computes the number of time slots that can be reserved at the requested start time and the number of time slots that can be reserved at future times for the requested duration. These times are carefully computed to present the user with a minimum of “real” choices; “real” means that the choices do not contain redundant and/or inadequate choices.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents DARSION functional architecture; it describes the algorithm used by ARMs to perform local resources reservation; it also presents the inter-ARM signaling protocol used by DARSION to realize advance reservation across multiple optical domains. Section 3 presents DARSION prototype software architecture we implemented using JAVA. Section 4 presents the simulation-based performance analysis of DARSION. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

DARSION functional architecture

One of the key challenges in DARSION design is that DARSION should be able to support seamlessly network heterogeneity and scalability. To satisfy these requirements, we developed two-tier DARSION system architecture (see Fig. 1); we used a similar architecture for layer-3 resources reservation [18].

Advance resources reservation. Each ARM is associated with one optical network. Each ARM realizes its portion of the DARSION functionality within the associated network (see Section 2.1 for more

DARSION prototype software architecture

We have implemented a prototype of DARSION based on the concepts described in Section 2. Fig. 3 illustrates the software architecture of the prototype system. In the prototype architecture, the ARM component described in Section 2 is divided into two parts: one DARSION ARM, and one or more Network ARMs. The DARSION ARM receives user requests. Running under the control of the DARSION ARM is one or more Network ARMs, one Network ARM for each network. For each network under the ARM, there exists

Simulation results and analysis

We studied the performance of DARSION by means of network simulations, considering the NSFNET topology with 14 nodes as shown in Fig. 4. We assume that each single fiber link is bi-directional, and has the same number of wavelengths operating at 50 Gbps. Fig. 4 shows the network graph and the length of each fiber link. Each wavelength is divided into 50 small timeslots (circuits) of 1 Gbps each. The propagation delay between two connected nodes ranges between 1.5 and 14 ms. In the network, a node

Conclusion

This paper described the functional and software architecture of DARSION, a distributed advance reservation system for interconnected optical networks, which supports current and advance resource reservation for communication channels spanning multiple slotted optical networks. DARSION consists of two major functional components: ARMs and Adapters. Each ARM manages one optical network, provides DARSION functions within its domain, and cooperates with other ARMs to support end-to-end services.

A. Hafid is Professor at département d’Informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, where he founded the Network Research Lab (NRL) in 2005. Prior to joining University of Montreal, he was with Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bell Communication Research), NJ, US, faculty at University of Western Ontario, research director at Advance Communication Engineering Center, Canada, researcher at Computer Research Institute of Montreal, Canada, and visiting scientist at

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Cited by (1)

A. Hafid is Professor at département d’Informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, where he founded the Network Research Lab (NRL) in 2005. Prior to joining University of Montreal, he was with Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bell Communication Research), NJ, US, faculty at University of Western Ontario, research director at Advance Communication Engineering Center, Canada, researcher at Computer Research Institute of Montreal, Canada, and visiting scientist at GMDFokus, Germany. Dr. A. Hafid has extensive academic and industrial research experience in the area of the management of next generation networks.

A. Maach is Research associate at département d’Informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal. He was at School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, where he finished his Ph.D. in 2005 on optical networks and traffic engineering.

J. Drissi received his master in mathematics from university of Grenoble (France) in 1981, his master (1994) and his Ph.D. (2000) in computer science from University of Montreal. Since September 2000, he is an Assistant Professor at the computer science department at Texas State University-San Marcos. His fields of interest include embedded systems, Optical networks and security in wireless networks.

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