SDN-based resource allocation in MPLS networks: A hybrid approach

The highly dynamic nature of the current network traffics makes the network managers to exploit the flexibility of the state-of-the-art paradigm called SDN. In this way, there has been an increasing interest in hybrid networks of SDN-MPLS. In this paper, a new traffic engineering architecture for SDN-MPLS network is proposed. To this end, OpenFlow-enabled switches are applied over the edge of the network to improve flow-level management flexibility while MPLS routers are considered as the core of the network to make the scheme applicable for existing MPLS networks. The proposed scheme re-assigns flows to the Label-Switched Paths (LSPs) to highly utilize the network resources. In the cases that the flow-level re-routing is insufficient, the proposed scheme re-computes and re-creates the undergoing LSPs. To this end, we mathematically formulate two optimization problems, ie, i) flow re-routing and ii) LSP re-creation, and propose a heuristic algorithm to improve the performance of the scheme. Our experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed hybrid SDN-MPLS architecture in traffic engineering superiors traditionally deployed MPLS networks.