Pre-provisioning of local protection for handling dual-failures in OpenFlow-based networks

Abstract

An essential requirement in operating a carriergrade network (CGN) is ensuring the high availability and reliability. Software-defined networking (SDN) is expected to address such requirement while improving the network management. One challenging issue faced in the process of enhancing the reliability of SDN-enabled CGN is how to achieve rapid recovery with minimal effort. There are two well-known approaches to determine the failover scope: end-to-end (global) detouring and local detouring. Particularly, the local detouring approach provides an efficient means to achieve faster recovery, as it locally detours the disrupted flows around the failed network components using a preconfigured alternative path. However, it requires thousands of flow entries per switch to be configured. To address the technical challenges, we propose a fault-tolerant forwarding table design (FFTD), which groups the flows using group entries and aggregates the flows using a tagging mechanism for scalable and rapid recovery from the dual-failures of switches or links without overburdening the controller and the flow table's memory. Our extensive emulation results reveal that the proposed FFTD satisfies the CGN's 50 ms recovery requirement. Additionally, it reduces the alternate path flow storage requirement by up to 99%.