Disaster-resilient control plane design and mapping in software-defined networks

Abstract

Abstract-Communication networks, such as optical core networks heavily depend on their physical infrastructure, and hence they are vulnerable to man-made disasters, such as Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) or Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) attacks, as well as to natural disasters, such as earthquakes. Large-scale disasters may cause huge data loss and connectivity disruption in these networks. As society's dependence on network services increases, the need for novel survivability methods to mitigate the effects of disasters on communication networks becomes a major concern. SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN), by centralizing control logic and separating it from physical equipment, facilitates network programmability and opens up new ways to design disasterresilient networks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the potential of SDN, along with data-plane survivability we also need to design the control plane to be resilient enough to survive network failures caused by disasters. For resiliency of the control-plane, we need to select appropriate mapping of the controllers over the physical network, and then ensure that the connectivity among the controllers (controller-to controller) and between the controllers and the switches (switch to controllers) is not compromised by physical infrastructure failures. Several distributed SDN controller architectures have been proposed to mitigate the risks of overload and failure, but they are optimized for limited faults without addressing the extent of large-scale disaster failures. In this paper, we present a novel disaster-aware control-plane design and mapping scheme, formally model this problem, and demonstrate a significant reduction in the disruption of controller-to-controller and switch-to-controller communication channels using our approach.

Technology-related disasters: A survey towards disaster-resilient Software Defined Networks

“…Sedef Sadav et al [47] address the resilience aspect of the network under man-made attacks, such as electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or Weapon of mass destruction (WMD), with a particular emphasis on the cascading failures after the main event. The authors are proposing to use SDN to address today's inability to respond in a timely fashion to large and complex disasters.…”

A survey on network resiliency methodologies against weather-based disruptions

“…In order to preserve network connectivity, also the control plane of the network requires to be disaster resilient, especially in a scenario where a reaction to an alert is required and therefore quick network reconfiguration is needed [34]. Hence, in an alert-based control plane design we have to avoid that switches getting disconnected from the control logic or the network falls into several connected islands upon a controller failure [34].…”

“…Hence, in an alert-based control plane design we have to avoid that switches getting disconnected from the control logic or the network falls into several connected islands upon a controller failure [34]. Several distributed SDN controller architectures have been proposed to mitigate the risks of overload and failure, but they are optimized for limited faults without addressing the extent of large-scale disaster failures [35].…”

Designing Reliable Virtual Service Network over Open Substrate Infrastructure

“…[1] proposed a hybrid strategy heuristic algorithm by utilizing a preserved quota for backup substrate link. In order to reduce the redundant resource, [2] proposed a method that nodes and links are backed up in different areas for the virtual network, which requires virtual nodes to transmit the current states to the backup nodes and exacerbates substrate network resources consumption.…”

“…After that, aggregated META data is verified for accuracy evaluation. META = f aggregate (META X , gossip) (1) META data acquisition, aggregation and verification are the recursive processes. In the step 4 and 5, we identify the overlapped geolocation of the substrate components by using the geofences.…”