Planning Of Dynamic Virtual Optical Cloud Infrastructures: The Geysers Approach

This article focuses on planning and replanning of virtual infrastructures over optical cloud infrastructures comprising integrated optical network and IT resources. This concept has been developed in the context of the European project GEYSERS. GEYSERS has proposed a novel multi-layer architecture, described in detail, that employs optical networking capable of provisioning optical network and IT resources for end-to-end cloud service delivery. The procedures required to perform virtual infrastructure planning and replanning at the different architecture layers are also detailed. An optimization scheme suitable to dynamically plan and replan virtual infrastructures is presented and compared to conventional approaches, and the benefits of dynamic replanning are discussed and quantified. The final project demonstration, focusing on planning, replanning, and dynamically establishing virtual infrastructures over the physical resources, is presented, while some emulation results are provided to further evaluate the performance of the GEYSERS solution.