Carrier-grade networks comprise several layers where different protocols
coexist. Nowadays, most of these networks have different control planes to
manage routing on different layers, leading to a suboptimal use of the network
resources and additional operational costs. However, some routers are able to
encapsulate, decapsulate and convert protocols and act as a liaison between
these layers. A unified control plane would be useful to optimize the use of
the network resources and automate the routing configurations. Software-Defined
Networking (SDN) based architectures, such as OpenFlow, offer a chance to
design such a control plane. One of the most important problems to deal with in
this design is the path computation process. Classical path computation
algorithms cannot resolve the problem as they do not take into account
encapsulations and conversions of protocols. In this paper, we propose
algorithms to solve this problem and study several cases: Path computation
without bandwidth constraint, under bandwidth constraint and under other
Quality of Service constraints. We study the complexity and the scalability of
our algorithms and evaluate their performances on real topologies. The results
show that they outperform the previous ones proposed in the literature.Comment: IEEE INFOCOM 2016, Apr 2016, San Francisco, United States. To be
published in IEEE INFOCOM 2016, \<http://infocom2016.ieee-infocom.org/\&g