Abstract
Recent studies have proposed different approaches to mitigate the risk of overload and failure in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). Some of these approaches have proven effective but only in specific use cases, making it potentially difficult to generalize their application. Furthermore, network failure detection and recovery by the SDN control plane requires sophisticated software logic running on multiple controllers that are non-intrusive to the network environment. While this allows more flexibility to respond to failure events, it also implies that each controller application must include its recovery logic, which increases code complexity. In this paper, we propose a fast fail-over technique for solving the problem of a controller failure or target availability in the network. We argue that inter-domain controller synchronization can result in high network overhead and should be minimized to per-need base only. To this end, upon detecting a failure in the control plane, the proposed fast failure recovery technique leverages a load-shifting scheme to initialize alternate paths and proactively instantiate flow rules to reduce flow setup latency. To prevent packet loss during failure recovery, we utilize a forwarding information table that quickly replays inputs to the controller after failure recovery. Our extensive experiments show that the average latency incurred by the controller to controller communication is approximately twice that of per-need based synchronization. The experimental results also show that our proposed technique achieved a 50% reduction in service interruption period and 75% flow_mod reduction during a single link failure over the traditional SDN baseline approach.
Highlights
Within the past decade, the concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has evolved from a simple idea [11], [19] to a new networking paradigm that aims to tackle issues in legacy networks, i.e., vendor dependency and management complexity
PROBLEM FORMULATION We provide an overview of a Distributed Controller SDN (DC-SDN) architecture with the control plane comprising a set C = {c1, . . . , cn} of n physically distributed controllers, the data plane consisting of a set S = {s1, . . . , sm} of m virtual switches
We compare the communication latency incurred by Fast Fail-over Distributed Controller (FFDC) with Floodlight High Availability, logically distributed controller represented as DC
Summary
The concept of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has evolved from a simple idea [11], [19] to a new networking paradigm that aims to tackle issues in legacy networks, i.e., vendor dependency and management complexity. OpenFlow allows direct interaction with the forwarding plane of network devices through a well-defined Application Programming Interface (API) This interaction can be achieved in two approaches, namely, proactive flow programming and reactive flow programming. A typical SDN network is susceptible to different kinds of vulnerability depending on the control flow operations in reference. Contrary to the other two control flow operations, the intracontroller operations are initiated by applications running on a controller (e.g., a DHCP application requesting topology information) This type of operation can be achieved by interacting with a reference application responsible for computing the current topology or by making use of internal APIs provided by the controller. We present a fast failover technique to detect and recover from a failure in the link(s)/node of a distributed SDN control plane.
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