Fault tolerant data plane using SDN

Abstract

Recent developments in Internet technology have led to an increased importance of Software-Defined Networks (SDN). Due to advantages of this new network model that controls the network centrally, many service providers and vendors expect that traditional networks should be superseded by SDN. However, because of their centralized nature, they are vulnerable in terms of reliability and fault-tolerance issues both on data and control planes. Thus, developing such a fault-tolerant SDN design is quite important. In this study, fault tolerance on the data plane is targeted by considering various network and performance measurements. In the experiments, the impact of the topology size, frequency of packets, and the number of flows in the current route on the recovery time is tested. Moreover, local and global recovery approaches are compared.