Towards Fault Tolerance Management Systems in SDN

Abstract

The issue of network operation, monitoring, and availability in traditional network environments has been one of the major challenges to addressing network administrators' struggles to deal with. The capacity for the network to comprehend the status and the performance of every node has been one of the priorities amongst others for network administrators to protect during troubleshooting in their network. However, the growing use of software-defined networks (SDN) technologies, as well as virtualization, pave the way to the solution of network operation, monitoring, and availability of hardware and services in a network environment. SDN has emerged with a novel paradigm of network abstractions that is dynamic, able to monitor network performance and fault management automatically, using its programmable capability. This paper presents a design of a fault tolerance management system for SDN controller framework for small to medium sized networks capable of detecting controller faults and nodes/links faultsin case entire network access is unavailable. The fault management system applies various approaches for fault detection and recovery to ensure the reliability and availability of the network resources.