Reliability Aware Multiple Path Installation in Software Defined Networking

Abstract: Being a state-of-the-art network, Software Defined Networking (SDN) decouples control and management planes from data plane of the forwarding devices by implementing both the control and management planes at logically centralized entity, called controller. This helps to make simple and easy both the network control and management. Failure of links occurs frequently in a computer network. To deal with the link failures, the existing approaches computes and installs multiple paths for a flow at the switches in SDN without considering the reliability value of the primary path. This incurs extra computation to compute multiple paths, and both increased computation time and traffic to install extra flow rules in the network. In this research work we propose a new approach that calculates the link reliability and then installs the number of multiple paths based on the reliability value of the primary path. More specifically, if a primary path has higher reliability then a smaller number of alternative paths should be installed. This shall decrease the path computational time and flow rule installation load at controller. Resultantly there shall be less flow rule entries in switch flow table which in turn will avoid the overflow of the flow table. Through simulation results, our proposed approach performs better as compared to the existing approach in term of computational overhead at controller, end-to-end delay for packet deliver and the traffic overhead for flow rule installation.