Link Capacity Planning for Fault Tolerant Operation in Hybrid SDN/OSPF Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to efficiently dimension link capacities in hybrid SDN/OSPF networks, proposing SDN Partitioning as a method that reduces spare capacity needs compared to traditional or other hybrid schemes.

Contribution

It introduces SDN Partitioning for hybrid SDN/OSPF networks, demonstrating it requires less spare capacity than legacy or other hybrid approaches.

Findings

SDN Partitioning reduces required spare capacity.

Hybrid SDN/OSPF schemes outperform legacy OSPF.

Full SDN deployment needs the least capacity.

Abstract

Link capacity dimensioning is the periodic task where ISPs have to make provisions for sudden traffic bursts and network failures to assure uninterrupted operations. This provision comes in the form of link working capacities with noticeable amounts of headroom, i.e., spare capacities that are used in case of congestions or network failures. Distributed routing protocols like OSPF provide convergence after network failures and have proven their reliable operation over decades, but require overprovisioning and headroom of over 50%. However, SDN has recently been proposed to either replace or work together with OSPF in routing Internet traffic. This paper addresses the question of how to robustly dimension the link capacities in emerging hybrid SDN/OSPF networks. We analyze the networks with various implementations of hybrid SDN/OSPF control planes, and show that our idea of SDN Partitioning requires less amounts of spare capacity compared to legacy or other hybrid SDN/OSPF schemes, outperformed only by a full SDN deployment.