This paper studies the resilient routing and (in-band) fast failover mechanisms supported in Software-Defined Networks (SDN). We analyze the potential benefits and limitations of such failover mechanisms, and focus on two main metrics: (1) correctness (in terms of connectivity and loop-freeness) and (2) load-balancing. We make the following contributions. First, we show that in the worst-case (i.e., under adversarial link failures), the usefulness of local failover is rather limited: already a small number of failures will violate connectivity properties under any fast failover policy, even though the underlying substrate network remains highly connected. We then present randomized and deterministic algorithms to compute resilient forwarding sets; these algorithms achieve an almost optimal tradeoff. Our worst-case analysis is complemented with a simulation study.
Alternative solutions to make routing more resilient rely on special header bits (e.g., to determine when to switch from primary to backup paths, as in @cite_1 , or to encode failure information to make failure-aware forwarding decisions @cite_9 @cite_10 ), or on fly table modifications @cite_2 . Recently, @cite_5 made an interesting first step towards a better theoretical understanding of resilient SDN tables. The authors prove that routing tables can provide guaranteed resilience (i.e., loop-freeness) against a failure, when the network remains connected.
@cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_10
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Dealing with network failures effectively is a major operational challenge for Internet service providers. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global (i.e., network-wide) link state advertisements and routing table recomputations, causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. The drawback with these protocols is that they need to trade off routing stability and forwarding continuity. To improve failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a proactive local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing (FIR). The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. In this paper, we prove that when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, FIR always finds a loop-free path to a destination if one such path exists. We also formally analyze routing stability and network availability under both proactive and reactive approaches, and show that FIR provides better stability and availability than OSPF. Compact routing addresses the tradeoff between table sizes and stretch, which is the worst-case ratio between the length of the path a packet is routed through by the scheme and the length of an actual shortest path from source to destination. We adapt the compact routing scheme by Thorup and Zwick [2001] to optimize it for power-law graphs. We analyze our adapted routing scheme based on the theory of unweighted random power-law graphs with fixed expected degree sequence by [2000]. Our result is the first analytical bound coupled to the parameter of the power-law graph model for a compact routing scheme. Let n denote the number of nodes in the network. We provide a labeled routing scheme that, after a stretch--5 handshaking step (similar to DNS lookup in TCP IP), routes messages along stretch--3 paths. We prove that, instead of routing tables with O(n1 2) bits (O suppresses factors logarithmic in n) as in the general scheme by Thorup and Zwick, expected sizes of O(nγ log n) bits are sufficient, and that all the routing tables can be constructed at once in expected time O(n1+γ log n), with γ = τ-22 τ-3 + e, where τ∈(2,3) is the power-law exponent and e 0 (which implies e With the same techniques as for the compact routing scheme, we also adapt the approximate distance oracle by Thorup and Zwick [2001, 2005] for stretch-3 and we obtain a new upper bound of expected O(n1+γ) for space and preprocessing for random power-law graphs. Our distance oracle is the first one optimized for power-law graphs. Furthermore, we provide a linear-space data structure that can answer 5--approximate distance queries in time at most O(n1 4+e) (similar to γ, the exponent actually depends on τ and lies between e and 1 4 + e). Many modern network designs incorporate "failover" paths into routers' forwarding tables. We initiate the theoretical study of such resilient routing tables. An algorithm for constructing and adaptively maintaining routing tables in communication networks is presented. The algorithm can be employed in message as well as circuit switching networks, uses distributed computation, provides routing tables that are loop-free for each destination at all times, adapts to changes in network flows, and is completely failsafe. The latter means that after arbitrary failures and additions, the network recovers in finite time in the sense of providing routing paths between all physically connected nodes. For each destination, the routes are independently updated by an update cycle triggered by the destination.