Retro flow: Maintaining control resiliency and flow programmability for software-defined WANs

Zehua Guo*, Wendi Feng, Sen Liu, Wenchao Jiang, Yang Xu, Zhi Li Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

23 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Providing resilient network control is a critical concern for deploying Software-Defined Networking (SDN) into Wide-Area Networks (WANs). For performance reasons, a Software-Defined WAN is divided into multiple domains controlled by multiple controllers with a logically centralized view. Under controller failures, we need to remap the control of offline switches from failed controllers to other active controllers. Existing solutions could either overload active controllers to interrupt their normal operations or degrade network performance because of increasing the controller-switch communication overhead. In this paper, we propose RetroFlow to achieve low communication overhead without interrupting the normal processing of active controllers during controller failures. By intelligently configuring a set of selected offline switches working under the legacy routing mode, RetroFlow relieves the active controllers from controlling the selected offline switches while maintaining the flow programmability (e.g., the ability to change paths of flows) of SDN. RetroFlow also smartly transfers the control of offline switches with the SDN routing mode to active controllers to minimize the communication overhead from these offline switches to the active controllers. Simulation results show that compared with the baseline algorithm, RetroFlow can reduce the communication overhead up to 52.6% during a moderate controller failure by recovering 100% flows from offline switches and can reduce the communication overhead up to 61.2% during a serious controller failure by setting to recover 90% of flows from offline switches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2019
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450367783
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 Jun 2019
Event2019 International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2019 - Phoenix, United States
Duration: 24 Jun 201925 Jun 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2019

Conference

Conference2019 International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQoS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhoenix
Period24/06/1925/06/19

Keywords

  • Control plane
  • Hybrid routing
  • Programmability
  • Resiliency
  • Software-defined networking
  • Wide area networks

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