Implementation of multiple routing configurations on software-defined networks with P4

In order to maintain high availability of communication networks, we should recover failures immediately after the failures occur. As one of techniques achieving such fast failure recovery, multiple routing configurations (MRC) have been proposed. In MRC, multiple backup routing configurations are prepared in advance to fast repair a single link/node failure. When a failure occurs during data transmission using a normal routing configuration, MRC changes the routing configuration to another routing configuration that does not use the failed point. Thus, MRC can realize fast recovery within few tens of milliseconds and continue the data transmission. In this paper, we implement MRC on software-defined networks with P4 (Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processeros). P4 is a programming language that enables us to define the behavior of the data plane of network equipment. We examine the MRC implementation, using Mininet.