Assessing the risk of violating SLA dependability requirements in software-defined networks

Dependability of computer and communication networks is an important aspect of the customer-provider relationship in the telecommunication industry. Considering the increasing interest in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, as well as unclear understanding of dependability in the context of traffic flows in such networks, it is not clear how to define the related objectives in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and how to estimate the risk of violation of the included dependability requirements. In this paper, we present a solution to both issues and we evaluate it in different scenarios by simulation. The results show that the proposed method is feasible and may help service providers to select the preferred recovery technique in SDN based on the estimated risk of violation of the SLA dependability requirements and known Service Level Objectives (SLOs).