Efficient fast recovery mechanism in Software-Defined Networks: Multipath routing approach

Abstract

Although Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a mature paradigm, failure recovery and management in SDN still need much research attention. OpenFlow, as an implementation of SDN, provides flexible and abstracted approach to configure SDN networks. This Paper focuses on failure recovery mechanism using OpenFlow. The proposed mechanism is divided into: (a) computing the working paths proactively between each source-destination pair and return a list of paths ordered by-path latency from shortest to longest path, (b)implement per-Link Bidirectional Forwarding Detection(BFD) for failure detection, to enable fast detection time, thus fast recovery time, (d) configure OpenFlow Fast Failover Group for restoration such that, the highest-priority bucket to be linked to the shortest path, the second highest-priority bucket linked to the second shortest path and so on. Upon failure, the switch will revert to the second fastest path, (e) to achieve high resource utilization, OpenFlow Select Group used to split the flow among the working paths. The proposed architecture of this work provides high utilization of network resources in addition to efficient fast detection and recovery time. As the evaluation shows, the usage of multipath routing with fast failover scheme provide much resource utilization and fast recovery time.