Enhanced local detouring mechanisms for rapid and lightweight failure recovery in OpenFlow networks

Failure management is one of the important instruments in software-defined networks (SDN) as with traditional networks to ensure uninterrupted and highly reliable services. SDN abstracts the network behaviors with the centralized controller, greatly simplifying network operations and management. So, it is expected from SDN to simplify and reduce the complex and time-consuming failure handling processes. Local detouring is a popular approach for rapid failure handling in traditional networks. Therefore, applying local detouring in SDN has been studied in various literature; however, the approach relies on storing preconfigured alternate paths per ongoing flows and exhausts the SDN controller for the per-flow detouring support. In this paper, we propose enhanced local detouring mechanisms with flow grouping and aggregation methods for the rapid and lightweight failure handling in OpenFlow networks. The proposed mechanisms are evaluated against a controller dependent reactive (CDR) mode, regarding failure response time, SDN controller overhead, and a required number of alternate path rules.