Fault-Tolerant OpenFlow-Based Software Switch Architecture with LINC Switches for a Reliable Network Data Exchange

The switches are essential for forwarding the packets in a local area network. If a switch fails, then the packets are not able to reach their destination, in spite of their long journey from the source. The new trend in Software Defined Networking (SDN) has made the use of software switches such as the OpenvSwitch quite popular. These software switches are used in datacenters to connect virtual machines on which application servers are deployed. Such switches have the advantages of software: ease of development and flexibility, with less optimal testing and reliability measures than hardware systems. The Software switches are required to be resilient to failure because the applications servers which are running from the VMs which are connected through them should always be connected with its clients. So fault-tolerance becomes an important aspect in the use of software switches. In this paper, we explore one mechanism for fault tolerance of LINC (Link Is Not Closed), an open source OpenFlow switch, which is written in Erlang programming language. Distributed system, concurrency, and fault-tolerance are built-in features of Erlang. We leverage these features of Erlang to realize a fault-tolerant distributed LINC switch system.