SD-FAST: A Packet Rerouting Architecture in SDN

Abstract

Communication link failure is common in any network. In Software Defined Network (SDN), protection-based recovery scheme reduces the failure recovery delay by installing alternative routes at the data plane switches. We can deploy Fast Failure Group (FFG) of OpenFlow protocol if a switch has an alternative path towards the destination; otherwise, the switch can use crankback approach to send the affected traffic towards the traversed route to find an alternative path. These existing recovery schemes force every packet to traverse a chain of matching tables even in the absence of a link failure, which impacts packet processing time and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we propose a packet rerouting architecture, called SD-FAST, that invokes recovery scheme only after facing failure and reduces both the packet processing and crankback backtracking time. We evaluate SD-FAST in Mininet, considering real and simulated traffic on real network topologies. The evaluation results confirm that SD-FAST can reduce around 73% crankback backtracking time and 64% delay compared to its counterparts.