Software-based fast failure recovery in load balanced SDN-based datacenter networks

Abstract

Load balancing is currently considered as a candidate solution to tackle the emerging problem of increasing bandwidth demand in intra-datacenter networks. Furthermore, because a short disruption of data transfer would corrupt the result of a long procedure of computation, fast failure management mechanisms are considered as integral part of current datacenters. In this paper, we propose a method which uses active probing to detect and manage failures in an OpenFlow based datacenter network exploiting load balancing among equal cost multiple paths. The proposed method is scalable and effective based on the actions it takes without involving the controller in the fast failure recovery procedure.