SpectrumChain: An Efficient Spectrum Management Framework in Blockchain-Enabled Flexible SDONs

Huge potentials of optical networks provide an excellent choice in meeting the exponential growth in bandwidth demand. In particular, Elastic Optical Networks (EONs), with its promising potentials in increased availability, failure resilience, load-balancing, new use cases for on-demand opportunities, and efficient resource allocations, are good candidates for the future high-speed networks. When EONs are augmented with the emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN), that decouples the data and control planes, an agile and synergistic combination emerges under a general term of SDN-based optical networking (SDON), albeit with operational challenges. In this paper, we introduce a blockchain-enabled QoS-based inter-Internet Service Provider (ISP) routing coordination framework for SDONs, SpectrumChain (SC), to eliminate centralized mediators and reduce QoS signaling overhead. Experimental results show that the SC framework can effectively handle the QoS-enabled inter-ISP routing in SDON architecture in terms of flow setup time, message overhead, and requests serviced as compared to the traditional approaches.