Assuring Segment Routing Distributive-ness on OpenFlow Network with Stateful Data Plane

OpenFlow-based segment routing offers a programmable segment routing to support better network management such as a fine-grain traffic steering, nonECMP load balancing, and programmable tunneling. Nevertheless, its centralized dependency is vulnerable to link failure that might lead to complete failure of segment routing, particularly in geographically distributed networks. This paper proposed a method to regain the distributed property of segment routing on OpenFlow Networks to enable a fault-tolerant routing schema. The method uses a decentralized, inter-switch communication channel implemented using state keeping ability of stateful data plane to enable a distributed construction and recovery of segment routing forwarding path. As a result, the proposed method can recover the routing path in a distributed fashion within 1-second latency. The experiment results show that while the proposed method regain the fault tolerant ability, it remains stable and scalable.