Fast Failover and Switchover for Link Failures and Congestion in Software Defined Networks

In this paper, we present a fast failover mechanism and a fast switchover mechanism to deal with link failure and congestion problems. In the fast failover mechanism, the controller pre-establishes multiple paths for each source-destination pair in the related OpenFlow-enabled (OF) switches. When a link becomes faulty, OF switches are able to failover the affected flows to another path. Based on the pre-established paths, in the fast switchover mechanism, the controller periodically monitors the status of each port of each OF switch. When the average transmission rate of a port consistently exceeds the rate threshold, the controller would decrease the transmission rate of the port by iteratively switching the flow with the minimum rate to another path. The emulation on Ryu controller and Mininet emulator shows the average recovery time of the fast failover mechanism is less than 40 ms, compared to hundreds of ms in the fast restoration mechanism. And, the fast switchover mechanism can reduce 47.5%-72.5% sustained time of link congestion depending on the parameter setting.