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Link failures are commonly observed in computer networks, including the newly emerging Software Defined Network (SDN). Considering that failure recovery methods used in traditional networks cannot be applied to SDN networks directly, we propose a method named pro-VLAN in this paper, which calculates a backup path and assigns a unique VLAN id for each link of the network based on the protection mechanism. It makes the most of SDN’s features and can recover a single link failure in SDN with the advantages of high efficiency, strong scalability and wide applicability. More specifically, high efficiency (i.e., a fast failure recovery with a low memory consumption) is achieved by calculating backup paths for each link instead of each flow and using group tables to switch backup paths automatically and locally when failures occur. Strong scalability (i.e., the amount of backup flow entries per switch is stable) is achieved by keeping the amount of links per switch no matter how the network scale extends or how the amount of flows increases. Wide applicability is achieved by always finding a path available without modifying any hardware or protocol as long as the network is still reachable after a link failure. Simulation results and mathematical analysis demonstrate that both pro-VLAN and a flow-based protection method achieve a fast failure recovery, while pro-VLAN consumes less than 1% of the forwarding entries to store backup paths as compared to the flow-based method. Moreover, when the network scale increases from 10 to 60 switches by 500%, the increase of the number of backup flow entries per switch built by pro-VLAN is only less than 50%.

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