Routing loop audit mechanism based on SDN

Routing loops can cause packet loss and long delay problems in the traditional network. Even in future networks — Software-Defined Networks, with loop-free implementation mechanism, it still suffers loop problems. In this paper, we propose an architecture to solve the loop problem in SDN. Unlike the existing passive routing loop detection algorithm, this algorithm processes based on the SDN loop-free characteristic, by auditing third-party network forwarding rules' modification requests to avoids loop generation, thus avoid the network loop problems. Testbed is built to simulate our proposed algorithm. The evaluation shows that the loop audit algorithm proposed in this paper has better performance in extra spatial utilization and smaller number of extra interactions between SDN controller and switches.