Optimize Routing in Hybrid SDN Network with Changing Traffic

Traffic Engineering is an efficient tool to balance the network flows and, thus improving the network performance with limited network resources. The goal of traffic engineering is to find an efficient and robust routing to balance the flows with changing traffic. Multiple traffic matrices are good representatives of the changing traffic. The emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides us a more flexible way to route the network flows with multiple traffic matrices. We expect to optimize the routing of the average case performance over multiple traffic matrices and, at the same time, bound the worst case performance for some unexpected traffic in hybrid SDN network. In this paper, we first formulate the problem of optimizing both the average case and worst case performance of the routing over multiple traffic matrices. Then, we prove the problem is NP-hard and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm with real traffic datasets. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the worst case performance of our routing can be dramatically improved by 32.15% with a little sacrifice of the average case performance by 2.01% and demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in optimizing both the average case and worst case performance of routing.