A New Method for Control-plane Congestion Control in Chip-scale Optical Networks

Abstract

Abstract. Recently, various optical networks have been proposed for chip-scale communication on large-scale many-core chips, including optical burst-switching (OBS). The overall throughput of OBS network is dually constrained by congestion and loss in both the data-plane (i.e., burst contention) and the control-plane (i.e., header packet losses). While previous studies mainly focus on maximizing data-plane throughput, little work has been done on the control-plane congestion problem. In chip-scale OBS, massive fine-grained data bursts, stringent transmission delay budget and moderate network operation frequency have actually constrained the electronic header processing capability, leading to serious network congestion. This paper proposes a new approach based on ingress regulation to overcome the control-plane congestion problem. In our scheme, before being injected, every concurrent packet flow is globally regulated and coordinated so that the aggregated flows do not exceed the header processing capacity of routing nodes, leading to the alleviation of control-plane congestion. We use real application traces to evaluate our method. Simulation results validate that the proposed approach can effectively minimize the control-plane congestion and improve system performance in terms of transmission delay and burst loss rate.