Amaru: Plug&Play Resilient In-Band Control for SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a pillar of next-generation networks. Implementing SDN requires the establishment of a decoupled control communication, which might be installed either as an out-of-band or in-band network. While the benefits of in-band control networks seem apparent, no standard protocol exists and most of setups are based on ad-hoc solutions. This article defines Amaru, a protocol that provides plug&play resilient in-band control for SDN with low-complexity and high scalability. Amaru follows an exploration mechanism to find all possible paths between the controller and any node of the network, which drastically reduces convergence time and exchanged messages, while increasing robustness. Routing is based on masked MAC addresses, which also simplifies routing tables, minimizing the number of entries to one per path, independently of the network size. We evaluated Amaru with three different implementations and diverse types of networks and failures, and obtained excellent results, providing almost on-the-fly rerouting and low recovery time.