Comparison of Two Sharing Modes for a Proposed Optical Enterprise-Access SDN Architecture

In prior work, a proposed two-wavelength design for high-speed access links was shown to be a cost-effective means for large enterprises to improve the performance of large dataset transfers. In this original design, requests to dynamically connect a second wavelength to one of the shared high-speed provider IP-router ports for large dataset transfers are handled in Immediate-Request (IR) mode. In this paper, we consider an alternative solution for sharing high-speed provider ports, i.e., Advance-Reservation (AR) mode, which requires provider-side storage. Simulation results show that the AR-mode solution can achieve performance improvements over the IR-mode solution in terms of blocking probability and average response times. We also provide a differential cost-and-power comparison of the AR-with-storage mode and the IR mode to quantify the extra cost and power consumption introduced by the in-network storage needed in the AR mode.