On the resilience of software defined routing platform

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Software Defined Networking (SDN)/OpenFlow, which is a novel network architecture splitting control and data planes. The SDN-enabled products have also been widely deployed in many production networks aiming to bypass the limitations of current Internet architecture. There are several efforts on building Software Defined Routing Platform (SDRP), which integrates SDN/OpenFlow within IP routing. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are a few successful works on realizing SDRP despite of the flexibility and rich features of SDN. In this paper, we investigate state-of-the-art works towards SDRP. We have evaluated the performance of a mainstream SDRP named RouteFlow. Our evaluations have been conducted using both the emulator Mininet and a real testbed with physical switches. Different to other works, we focus on the resilience aspect of the routing platform. The evaluation results show that RouteFlow is resilient against both single and multiple link failures. Additionally, OSPF provided by RouteFlow achieves a shorter failover time than the legacy OSPF. In the case of RIPv2, RouteFlow's protocol has a comparable performance value with the distributed one.