2018 18th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology
A SDN-Based Hybrid Electrical Optical Architecture
Kexian Chen
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks
Xidian University
Xi’an, China
e-mail: kx.chen.xidian@foxmail.com
Yunfeng Lu
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks
Xidian University
Xi’an, China
e-mail: yunfeng.lu.xidian@foxmail.com
Abstract—As the high-bandwidth and data-intensive
applications evolving rapidly, traditional electrical networks
are no longer able to meet the increasing traffic requirements.
In order to improve the communication performance of data
center network(DCN), the hybrid electrical/optical
architecture has become a new research topic. Moreover,
traditional architectures are often too complicate to manage.
As a new technology, Software Defined network (SDN)
addresses this issue effectively. In this paper, we propose a
hybrid architecture based on SDN. The control manager is
used to monitor and allocate traffic, then configure the
network by SDN. There is a hybrid network platform under
the implementation of virtual machine migration. The
experiment shows that the proposed scheme reduces the total
time of the virtual machine migration effectively compared to
that running on the electrical architecture. In addition, our
scheme can configure the network topology flexibly and
achieve load balancing.
Keywords-optical network; SDN; interconnection networks;
testbed
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays cloud computing relies hardly on the
foundation of DCN which provides a high bandwidth for
traffic requirements between thousands of servers [1].
Although the traditional DCN transmits packets quickly, it is
still difficult to achieve the applications running with high-
bandwidth. Therefore, the hybrid electrical optical network
architecture with high bandwidth alternative has become a
hot research topic in academia and industry [2]. Recently,
several typical architectures have been proposed, such as c-
through [3], Helios [4], and OSA [5]. In general, these
architectures which have a unified function of traffic
monitoring and management are designed to distribute traffic
to electrical/optical network as needed. Among them, c-
through proposes a traffic management on the server side,
and establishes an optical link between the each rack, thus
transmitting data streams with high-bandwidth requirements.
Although c-through can ease and improve the performance
978-1-5386-7635-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Xiaoshan Yu
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks
Xidian University
Xi’an, China
e-mail: xsyu@xidian.edu.cn
Jiahui Wang
State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks
Xidian University
Xi’an, China
e-mail: jiahui.wang.xidian@foxmail.com
of DCN, it also brings the problems of complex management
and low switching speed in the DCN.
With the rapid development of SDN technology, it
provides a flexible and programmable control function. For
users, the flat control and data plane makes the configuration
of DCN more flexible. In our architecture, we can achieve
the configuration of hybrid network by using SDN easily.
Another way to achieve good performance is to bind
multiple interfaces of the servers. In the multi-interface mode
of communication, we can improve the speed of switching,
making it easier to switch to the optical network with high-
bandwidth requirements and improve the conversion of the
entire network flexibly.
Therefore, in order to deal with high-bandwidth traffic
and reduce the duration of optical switching, we use a multi-
interface mode to establish different transmission exports
between the servers and hybrid network. In order to simplify
the complexity of management, we use the functions of
separating the data plane and control plane by fully utilizing
SDN to realize configuration of the network.
In this work, we propose and evaluate a hybrid
architecture scheme which takes the advantage of SDN [6]
and multi-interfaces communication [7-8] to achieve fast
switching and flexible configuration. This scheme can
improve the management efficiency of the hybrid network,
and enhance the transmission between network interfaces
which provide load balancing.
By experimenting with different finds of hybrid network
architectures, we find that our hybrid scheme benefit in many
performances. Firstly, the multi-interface method of binding
improves the switching speed of links. Secondly, we can
provide programming capabilities of the network through
SDN and simplify complexity effectively. Third, the hybrid
network architecture we propose can be applied to
applications such as virtual machine migration, which have
long duration and high-bandwidth requirements.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section II gives an overview of background. In section
III, we describe the system structure of the hybrid network
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scheme in detail. Section IV demonstrates the system SDN controller is working to connect all switches to
implementation. Section V makes a system evaluation and complete network configuration.
compares the performance between electrical network and
the proposed system. Section VI presents a brief.
II. BACKGROUND
The development of cloud computing leads to an soar
increase in traffic which puts pressure on the network
bandwidth within the DCN. The demands and challenges to
network architecture are gradually increasing [9]. Therefore,
studying the hybrid network is of great significance to the
development of future network technology.
A. Research of Hybrid Network
Figure 1. Network topology diagram
A hybrid network architecture is composed of electrical
and optical switches. In the hybrid architecture, large packets B. Traffic Monitor
flows are transmitted in an optical network and the rest are
transmitted through the electrical network. However, a single As illustrated in Figure 2, the traffic monitor runs on the
optical duration of allocation is much longer than a single server. In order to detect the big traffic easily, we modify the
electrical packet transmission. Despite optical technology default value of the TCP socket buffer. Traffic buffering is
develops the important and numerous innovations, today’s done by enlarging the socket buffer limits. The packets
hybrid architecture still need a duration of milliseconds to accumulate in the buffer and the queue length of the buffer is
switch a optical link and establish a new configuration. obtained by monitor. The monitor daemon acquires the
stacking length dynamically in real time.
B. SDN Technology
DCN supports a wide range of applications and services
for cloud computing. The flexible network management is a
critical feature of SDN technology. OpenFlow [10] protocol
plays an important role role in SDN technology which
enables the separation of data and control planes. In the
control plane, traffic demands and timely reconfiguration
which matches the demands can be effective used when the
network topology changes. In the data plane, when a path is
established between two servers, there are two exports of the
hybrid network. A hybrid network requires a mechanisms of
traffic management to control the switching transmission
dynamically. Usually found in the DCN, a large scale of
reconfiguration causes events of up/down links. The method
of centralized control therefore makes network configuration Figure 2. System detection and control principle
more flexible.
C. Traffic Management Module
III. SYSTEM DESIGN
The management module gets length of buffer packets
We propose a hybrid architecture which uses SDN and from monitor. Then the management module informs the
multi-interfaces to make the system and network transparent SDN controller to configure the optical topology according
to applications. In this section, we will focus on the to the destination.
scheduling mechanisms of the architecture. Figure 1 shows a The export needs to be enlarged in order to transport all
simple topology of our testbed and Figure 2 shows the packets with different bandwidth. We bind two physical
architecture of the management system. network interfaces as the export of electrical and optical
A. System Architecture links [11]. The export which binds the same IP address is
Figure 1 shows an example of architecture implemented transparent to upper applications. Management module
with a two-tier network. In our testbed, the architecture selects different interfaces to satisfy the bandwidth
consists several SDN switches used to set different requirements, which reduces the switching time of interfaces
bandwidth rate thus to simulate an environment of hybrid and the waiting time of traffic at queue stack. In addition, the
network. complexity of the management is reduced effectively.
We use the way of binding that each host has two D. Topology Management
physical network interfaces which are connected to the In the topology management, we use RYU controller to
export of optical and electrical network respectively. Then, achieve the optical network configuration. The OpenFlow

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protocol makes the configuration process more flexible,
which also provides a function of monitoring the traffic [12].
We run the controller management on the server to set
topology according to the network export interfaces.
IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
Our scheme includes traffic monitoring and management.
Traffic monitor is set on the Linux kernel and the SDN
controller makes the implementation convenient and highly
achievable. Therefore, it is feasible for us to deploy
configuration on the hardware platform successfully.
A. Implementation on Server
1) Buffer setting
In order to simulate a large traffic communication in
hybrid network, We increase the value of the TCP buffer for
the Linux kernel. This approach makes applications to fill its
buffer when it has a large packets to send. The use of socket
buffer allows us to detect a path with high-bandwidth.
2) Traffic monitor
Each server runs management module which informs the
application about the link of export. The monitor daemon
obtains length of buffer and rate of traffic gets by netstat and
ifstat (Linux tools for testing performance).
Linux kernel allows data of applications to push into the
buffer where we use netstat to extract them and sum their
length. Then we set a value in the monitor as a threshold.
If the length and rate of an application were exceed the
threshold, a high bandwidth communication path is essential.
Furthermore, the tool of ifstat gives us a green way to read
the speed of specific interfaces directly. So the monitoring
daemon deliver the massage of parameters to the
management module.
3) Multi-interfaces binding
We bind two physical interfaces on the export of servers.
The management module control the behavior of interfaces
which through the corresponding drivers. In this way, the
management module allocates the interfaces to different
export. This binding approach works well to ensure that both
physical interfaces of electrical and optical links are fully
utilized and provides load balance of the transmission.
B. Implementation on Switch
1) SDN controller
SDN solves the problem of configuration by using
OpenFlow-based controller. We use RYU as the controller
which is a light daemon running on the server and makes the
SDN switch easy to configure.
2) Topology configuration
According to the result of the allocation, we use the RYU
controller to configure topology. Figure 3 shows the entire
process of configuration.
There are two physical interfaces having the same IP
address on each server. All packets are sent through a
physical interface connected to the switch in one
configuration. As illustrated in Figure 3, packets with high-
bandwidth are going through the export of optical network
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and the packets with low-bandwidth are going through the
electrical path.
Switching the export of servers leads to a reconfiguration
in the network [13]. When a new configuration is computed,
the management module sends redistribution commands to
the drivers and notifies the RYU about the new configuration.
The RYU daemons runs on the server, thus receiving the
notification massages from management module quickly.
Instead of broadcast, RYU can communicate to the switches
to reduce overhead directly.
Figure 3. SDN topology configuration
In this topology, we observe that the time of switching
and configuration could cast a few seconds. In addition,
advances in OpenFlow protocols could provide a transparent
mechanism, thus we can get the information of traffic in the
network which includes the source and destination as well as
the flow size.
V. SYSTEM EVALUATION
A. Application Scenario
We deployed the KVM virtual machine and a VMM
hypervisor based on the Linux kernel on the testbed [14].
Experimental parameters of topology are shown in Table I.
TABLE I. NETWORK TOPOLOGY PARAMETERS
Parameters
Device name Number Operating system
Node Server Four Ubuntu16.04
Controller Server One Ubuntu16.04+RYU
Switch SDN switch Three Picaos
In order to distinguish the hybrid network, we set 4M
electrical bandwidth and 40M optical bandwidth.
There are 4 VM virtual machines on a physical server.
Each VM configures with 1GB RAM, 10G hard disk on the
Ubuntu system. We use two SDN switches which support
the speed limit on each port and set the different value of the
bandwidth to simulate the hybrid network.
We migrate a running VM from one server to another
server dynamically. During the migration, we detect traffic
information and then use the management module to switch
export of interfaces. According the result of switching, we
use RYU controller to configure the network.
B. Experimental Evaluation
To simulate various conditions and detect the large traffic,
we enlarged the length of TCP buffer gradually. We begin by
examining 64k TCP buffer and set several value of buffer
sizes, then observe the performance of network. As a result,
the optical network can be configured and fully utilized
according to the different value of buffer detection by the
traffic management. In general practice, we can ignore the
influence form enlarge the TCP buffer, because the
consumption is moderate for Linux kernel.
Figure 4. Virtual machine migration total completion time
As a result of test, we measure the total completion time
of virtual machine migration. Figure 4 shows the effect of
total transmission on VM migration performance. In this
figure, the result shows that our hybrid scheme can reduce
the total time of migration comparing to the electrical
architecture. As expected, when the bandwidth of hybrid
network is higher, the performance of VM migration our
achieving is more obvious.
More importantly, our results clearly demonstrate that the
method of multiple interfaces can provide higher bandwidth
for the servers. We also find that, SDN controller simplify
the configuration of network effectively.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose a hybrid network based on
SDN and build a prototype system. We take the advantage of
SDN with multi-interfaces to reduce the difficulty of
configuration and improve the speed of switching links. The
experimental results show that the hybrid scheme can reduce
the total transmission time of virtual machine migration
effectively. In most cases, our scheme can adapt to the
different demands of high-bandwidth applications in DCN
and provide load balance performance.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation of China under Grants 61634004, and Grant
61472300, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities Grant No. JB170107 and No. JB180309, the key
research and development plan of Shaanxi province No.
2017ZDCXL-GY-05-01, and the General Armament
Department and Ministry of Education United Fund under
Grant No.6141A0224-003.
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