Dynamic Optimization of Load-Balancing and Reconfiguration Overhead in SD-ISP Networks
Slavica Tomović, Igor Radusinović · 2018
In this paper, we propose a new traffic engineering (TE) approach for software-defined Internet Service Provider (SD-ISP) networks that strives to maximize the network throughput and provide QoS (Quality of Service) with minimal reconfiguration cost. In contrast to the conventional TE approaches, which perform the network optimization periodically and control the side effects of reconfigurations by carefully choosing the period length between the optimization cycles, we use a bi-objective optimization model that minimizes maximum link utilization and the reconfiguration overhead. A new heuristic algorithm has been proposed in order to generate approximated Pareto frontier for the bi-objective optimization model, while the specially designed Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function is used to select the most appropriate solution from the approximated Pareto set. Our simulation study shows that the proposed approach suits the ISP's constraint on time-average reconfiguration rate by trading the throughput performance efficiently. Since the reconfiguration overhead is reduced, the network controller could be allowed to optimize resource allocation more frequently, in order to quickly and efficiently respond to the network changes.