A Hybrid Approach for Providing Improved Link Connectivity in SDN

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a unique approach to design and build networks. The networks services can be better handled by administrators with the abstraction that SDN provides. The problem of re-routing the packets with minimum overhead in case of link failure is handled in this work. Protection and restoration schemes have been used in the past to handle such issues by giving more priority to minimal response time or controller overhead based on the use case. A hybrid scheme has been proposed with per-link Bidirectional forwarding mechanism to handle the failover. The proposed method makes sure that the controller overhead does not impact the flow of packets, thereby decreasing the overall response time, even with guaranteed network resiliency. The computation of the next shortest backup path also guarantees that the subsequent routing of packets always chooses the shortest path available. The proposed method is compared with the traditional approaches and proven by results to perform better with minimal response time.