A Real-time and Memory-saving Link Recovery Mechanism for Green Software-Defined Networking

It is crucial to achieve high reliability and low latency concurrently for networked applications such as smart grid, data center, and intelligent factory. Furthermore, maintaining low complexity and energy efficiency for network devices incurs another dimension of challenges. Based on Software Defined Networking (SDN), this paper presents a link recovery mechanism which enhances the reliability of the network, maintains low communication latency, and reduces memory utilizations of the switching devices. To be specific, for achieving low latency, the protection-based link recovery approach is employed where the backup paths are pre-installed in the switch. Furthermore, an improved Segment Routing (SR) approach is utilized where the path information is encoded in the packet header for reducing the flow states stored in the switch. The experimental results show that, achieving real-time link recovery, the proposed mechanism leads to a 25% saving in memory utilizations and thus greatly reduces the complexity of the switch. The energy efficiency of the switch, and the entire network, can be enhanced accordingly.