A TCAM-Aware Segmented Rerouting Scheme for Fast Failover in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand for cloud application services and big data the Internet has become increasingly complex and difficult to manage in recent years In addition Software Defined Network (SDN) architectures have become increasingly prevalent In contrast to traditional networks in which the control plane and data plane are embedded in the same device SDN architectures implement the control plane on a centralized controller and the data plane on the SDN switches This centralized control architecture allows for an easy management of the SDN network by configuring the flow entries on the data plane of the SDN switches However the data planes of the switches are no longer autonomous Hence in the event of link or node failures the impacted switches cannot solve the problem on their own but need to wait to receive instructions from the remote controller To resolve the resulting latency problem various fast failover mechanisms based on installing the flow entries on the SDN switches with precomputed multiple-path information have been proposed However these approaches typically create a large number of rarely-utilized flow entries and hence incur a problem similar to thrashing thereby causing delays and an additional controller overhead Accordingly this thesis proposes a segmented rerouting scheme that provides a feasible protection method for both node failures and link failures while simultaneously minimizing the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) consumption The simulation results show that the proposed scheme not only ensures the robustness and timeliness of the failure recovery process but also minimizes the TCAM consumption in the SDN switches

Date of Award	2017 Sept 7
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hui-Tang Lin (Supervisor)