Optimizing bulk transfers with software-defined optical WAN

Xin Jin, Yiran Li, Da Wei, Siming Li, Jie Gao, Lei Xu, Guangzhi Li, Wei Xu, Jennifer L. Rexford

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

117 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bulk transfer on the wide-area network (WAN) is a fundamental service to many globally-distributed applications. It is challenging to efficiently utilize expensive WAN bandwidth to achieve short transfer completion time and meet mission-critical deadlines. Advancements in software-defined networking (SDN) and optical hardware make it feasible and beneficial to quickly reconfigure optical devices in the optical layer, which brings a new opportunity for traffic management on the WAN. We present Owan, a novel traffic management system that optimizes wide-area bulk transfers with centralized joint control of the optical and network layers. Owan can dynamically change the network-layer topology by reconfiguring the optical devices. We develop efficient algorithms to jointly optimize optical circuit setup, routing and rate allocation, and dynamically adapt them to traffic demand changes. We have built a prototype of Owan with commodity optical and electrical hardware. Testbed experiments and large-scale simulations on two ISP topologies and one inter-DC topology show that Owan completes transfers up to 4.45x faster on average, and up to 1.36x more transfers meet their deadlines, as compared to prior methods that only control the network layer.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages87-100
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341936
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 22 2016
Event2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016 - Florianopolis, Brazil
Duration: Aug 22 2016Aug 26 2016

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Other

Other2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityFlorianopolis
Period8/22/168/26/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Communication
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Signal Processing

Keywords

  • Bulk transfers
  • Cross-layer network management
  • Optical networks
  • Software-defined networking
  • Wide area networks

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