Proactive failure recovery scheme for data traffic in software defined networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is under consideration for deployment of carrier-grade networks (CGN). SDN must meet the critical network reliability requirement without incurring high complexity and network resource usage. Local detouring of disrupted flows from the failed network component to a preconfigured alternative path enables rapid recovery. Preconfigured alternate paths reduce the recovery time, however, result in storing thousands of flow entries per switch. Furthermore, the reliance on the controller for per-flow detouring would overwhelm the controller and increases the recovery time. To address these issues, we propose a proactive recovery scheme to repair an OpenFlow-based network from a node or a link failure without overburdening the controller and the flow tables memory. The proactive scheme aggregates the disrupted flows using virtual Local area network (VLAN) tagging to conserve the flow table memory requirement. A fast failover (FF) feature of OpenFlow is used to perform rapid local detouring. Our extensive simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves the recovery around 4 ms and satisfies the CGN's 50 ms recovery requirement. Additionally, the proactive recovery scheme reduces the alternate path flow storage requirement by up to 99%.