RO-RO: Routing Optimality - Reconfiguration Overhead Balance in Software-Defined ISP Networks

Software-defined networking provides a promising solution for traffic engineering (TE) by utilizing a centralized controller to remotely configure programmable network switches. In order to achieve optimal traffic distribution and meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the SDN controller must frequently solve complex optimization models. Applying an optimization model in ISP (Internet Service Provider) networks implies abundant routing reconfigurations, which adversely impact the network stability and QoS parameters. Namely, since routing updates usually cannot be applied on all switches at the same time, transient congestion and loops often happen as a result. Here, in this paper, we propose a new control framework that strives to maximize the network throughput and provide QoS with minimal reconfiguration costs. In contrast to the conventional TE approaches, which perform the network optimizations periodically and control the side effects of reconfigurations by carefully choosing the period length between the optimization cycles, we propose a multi-objective optimization model which jointly minimizes the routing cost function and the reconfiguration overhead. The Pareto frontier of the optimization model is generated by the augmented \epsilon -constrained method, whereas a Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function is used to select the best compromise solution from the Pareto set. Since the reconfiguration overhead is reduced, the network controller could be allowed to optimize resource allocation more frequently, in order to respond quickly and efficiently to the network changes. Considering that the proposed optimization model is computationally intractable in large-scale networks, we also propose a heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve large instances of the problem. In simulations and Mininet experiments, we show that our solution brings performance improvement over the conventional periodic TE techniques. Moreover, the proposed heuristic achieves better QoS request acceptance ratio than the state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization solution, despite the significantly reduced computational complexity.