Treating software-defined networks like disk arrays

Data networks require a high degree of performance and reliability as mission-critical IoT deployments increasingly depend on them. Although performance and fault tolerance can be individually addressed at all levels of the networking stack, few solutions tackle these challenges in an elegant and scalable manner. We propose a redundant array of independent network links (RAIL), adapted from RAID, that combines software-defined networking, disjoint network paths and selective packet processing to improve communications bandwidth and latency while simultaneously providing fault tolerance. Our work shows that the implementation of such a system is feasible without necessitating awareness or changes in the operating systems or hardware of IoT and client devices.