A Failure Recovery Protocol for Software-Defined Real-Time Networks

Abstract

In a distributed computing environment, real-time tasks communicate via a network infrastructure whose stability significantly impacts timing predictability. Network stability includes two aspects. First, the network has to guarantee the deadline requirements of real-time message transmissions in the absence of network failures. Second, the network needs to support dynamic recovery when network failures occur. This paper generalizes previous static routing approaches, which address the first aspect of the network stability, by developing a dynamic failure recovery policy and a protocol to address the second aspect of the network stability. We derive new real-time forwarding paths without compromising the capability of network devices to guarantee deadlines of concurrent real-time transmissions. We implement this mechanism on a network simulation platform and evaluate it on real hardware in a local cluster to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness. Experiments confirm the ability to bound recovery delays based on the network parameters.