Implementation Failure Recovery Mechanism using VLAN ID in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Link failure is a common problem that occurs in software-defined networks. The most proposed approach for failure recovery is to use pre-configured backup paths in the switch. However, it may increase the number of traffic packets after the traffic is rerouted through the backup path. In this research, the proposed method is the implementation of a failure recovery mechanism by utilizing the fast failover group feature in OpenFlow to store pre-configured backup paths in the switch. The disrupted traffic packets will be labeled using the VLAN ID, which can be used as a matching field. Due to this capability, VLAN ID can aggregate traffic packets into one entry table as a match field in the forwarding rules. Through implementation and evaluation, it is shown that the system can build a backup path in the switch and reroute the disrupted traffic to the backup path. Based on the parameters used, the results show that the proposed approach achieves a recovery time of around 1.02-1.26ms. Additionally, it can reduce the number of traffic packets and has a low amount of packet loss compared to previous methods.