FLIPPER: Fault-tolerant distributed network management and control

The current developments of software defined networking (SDN) paradigm provide a flexible architecture for network control and management, in the cost of deploying new hardwares by replacing the existing routing infrastructure. Further, the centralized controller architecture of SDN makes the network prone to single point failure and creates performance bottleneck. To avoid these issues and to support network manageability over the existing network infrastructure, we develop Flipper in this paper, that uses only software augmentation to convert existing off-the-shelf routers to network policy design and enforcement points (PDEP). We develop a distributed self-stabilized architecture for dynamic role change of network devices from routers to PDEPs, and make the architecture fault-tolerant. The performance of Flipper has been analyzed from both simulation over synthetic networks, and emulation over real network protocol stacks, and we observe that Flipper is scalable, flexible and fail-safe that can significantly boost up the manageability of existing network infrastructure.