Solution for Industrial Networks: Resilience-based SDN Technology

Software-defined networks (SDN) renders the possibilities of logically centralized entity and simplified network reconfiguration when there a link or network device failure. This paper investigates a novel Software-Defined Industrial Networks (SDIN) resilience that fills the gap between restoration and protection methods. Using a restoration method increments the recovery time proportionally to the number of affected flows contrarily to the protection method which achieves the fast recovery. However, the protection method uses many flow entries in the data plane level which in turn increases the lookup time taken to find a suitable flow entry in the flow table of the switch. This can have an impact on the end-to-end latency in the normal situation (before a failure occurs). So as to balance the two methods, we propose a Mixed Fast Resilience (MFR) method to guarantee the fast recovery of the primary path without affecting the end-to-end latency in the normal situation. The MFR decreases the number of round-trips at the controller and the computation time of a new working path by caching the flow entries which correspond to the backup paths in the hash table deployed in the controller memory as the internal flow table. Thus, we have constructed a simulation network. The results displayed that our resilience method enhance the network performance in failure recovery time, packet loss even when there is a failure, and end-to-end latency before a network failure.