Revive: A Reliable Software Defined Data Plane Failure Recovery Scheme

In Software-Defined Networking (SDN) links and switches (nodes) from data plane suffer from failure and impact network operations. In the presence of such failures, switches can use reactive or proactive recovery scheme. In the reactive scheme, switches contact the controller after detecting a link failure to get a backup route setup; whereas, switches locally redirect the traffic to the backup route without controller's intervention in the case of the proactive scheme. In this paper, we propose a hybrid recovery scheme, called Revive, where the controller proactively installs backup routes only in a subset of the switches between a source-destination pair. In addition, we judicially configure the routes in Revive to meet the application and the reliability demand while efficiently utilize the network resources. Extensive experimental results in Mininet using real topologies illustrate the benefits of Revive compared to its counterparts.