Multi-Broker based Market-Driven Service Provisioning in Multi-Domain SD-EONs in Noncooperative Game Scenarios

This work studies multi-broker based market-driven service provisioning in SD-EONs. By leveraging noncooperative sequential gaming, we design an intelligent bidding strategy for the brokers to compete for provisioning tasks. An OpenFlow based multi-domain SD-EON testbed is then used for experimental demonstrations. Introduction Software-defined networking (SDN) facilitates the programmability of networks. A combination of SDN and elastic optical networking (EON), i.e., software-defined EON (SD-EON), can possibly provide the most adaptive and programmable high-capacity networks with effective resource management and extended service reach1. Previously, we showed that the hierarchical control plane architecture that uses a broker to manage SDN controllers can achieve cost-effective multidomain service provisioning2. More recently, we proposed to realize multi-domain provisioning with a multibroker scenario3, and highlighted the market incentivedriven interactions between the domain managers and brokers. However, the networking economics behind the multi-broker scheme, i.e., the market-driven service provisioning principles, have not yet been studied. This paper studies how to assist the brokers in a multi-broker based multi-domain SD-EON to realize market-driven service provisioning. We first model the network operation as a noncooperative sequential game and design a bidding strategy for the brokers to compete for provisioning tasks. Then, we experimentally demonstrate the market-driven framework in an OpenFlow (OF) based multi-domain SD-EON testbed. The results show that the brokers can adjust their pricing strategies intelligently during dynamic network operation for maximizing their utilities. Network Architecture Fig. 1(a) shows the network architecture of the multibroker based multi-domain provisioning framework. In the multi-domain SD-EON, each domain has a centralized OF controller (OF-C), which subscribes to one or more brokers for the broker-service that facilitates multi-domain provisioning2. The brokers operate at a higher network control and management (NC&M) level than the OF-Cs and can gather intra-domain information from the OF-Cs, while different brokers can achieve multi-domain provisioning with different strategies. Market-Driven Multi-Broker Service Model We model the multi-domain SD-EON as G = {Gi(Vi,Ei,BRi),1 ≤ i ≤ N}, where N is the number of domains, Vi and Ei are the node and link sets in Domain i, respectively, and BRi is the set of brokers that Domain i subscribes to. A multi-domain lightpath request is denoted as LR(s,d,B,T ), where s and d (s∈Vi,d ∈V j, i 6= j) are the source and destination nodes, B is the bandwidth requirement and T is the service life-time. Upon receiving LR, the OF agent (OF-AG) on s forwards the request information to the OF-C in the source domain (i.e., OF-C-i in Domain i), which in turn broadcasts the information to the brokers that it subscribes to. Then, for the market-driven operation, each broker in BRi calculates a provisioning scheme based on its knowledge on network status, prices the commission that it will charge for the broker-service, and bids for setting up LR for OF-C-i. Finally, OF-C-i decides which broker to use based on their offered commissions.