Supercharge me: Boost Router Convergence with SDN

Abstract

By enabling logically-centralized and direct control of the forwarding behavior of a network, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) holds great promise in terms of improving network management, performance, and costs. Realizing this vision is challenging though as SDN proposals to date require substantial and expensive changes to the existing network architecture before the benefits can be realized. As a result, the number of SDN deployments has been rather limited in scope. To kickstart a wide-scale SDN deployment, there is a need for low-risk, high return solutions that solve a timely problem. As one possible solution, we show how we can significantly improve the performance of legacy IP routers, i.e. "supercharge" them, by combining them with SDN-enabled devices. In this abstract, we supercharge one particular aspect of the router performance: its convergence time after a link or a node failure.