Software-Defined Optical Local Area Network Architecture And Priority Traffic Performance Analysis

A software-defined (SD) solution for optical LANs is presented in our study. The SD approach implements the control plane for the LAN servers orchestration in order for the data plane to adopt a slotted efficient MAC protocol to avoid packet loss, reaching high performance. As opposed to many studies which suppose that the control plane is carried out in the electrical domain, our proposal adopts that the control communication is carried out in the optical domain, synchronized to the data transmissions. The coordinated operation of the data and control planes can be guaranteed for the adopted MAC protocol effective operation. A simple analysis is developed for the maximum throughput formula derivation, assuming several traffic volumes to adopt high traffic diversity in LANs. The adopted SD LAN architecture along with the MAC algorithm could be followed in several optical LAN paradigms, such as intra-data center networks, and enterprises or institutional LANs.