A replication component for resilient OpenFlow-based networking

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides a new paradigm for developing innovative management applications for networks and a new way to look for the resolution to the many problems which exist throughout the Internet today. The most popular approach to this paradigm is centralized network management. This approach aims to simplify the complex and difficult task of managing the services of a network. One of the problems raised by the centralized management approach is that the issue of a single point of failure can negatively compromise resilience of the whole network. The aim of this paper is to describe a novel mechanism that provides an increase of resilience in SDN using a component organization. In the SDN architecture, components run independently on top of the network OS, receiving updates from the network or updates generated from other components. Through the handling of these multiple types of updates, we have successfully developed a new component: the CPRecovery component. The CPRecovery component is based on the primary-backup mechanism which offers resilience against several types of failures in a centralized controlled network. Our results show that the building of such service for networks using SDN is straightforward, much less complex, and less prone to errors. Furthermore, it is possible to build management applications resilient to diverse types of failures using component organization approach.