Class-based traffic recovery with load balancing in software-defined networks

In the last years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a flexible paradigm driving innovation in future network architectures. Unfortunately, resilience, a key requirement in IP networks, is not an inherent feature of the SDN architecture. Indeed, the automatic reconfigurability of traffic paths in case of links or nodes failures is no more available. This paper deals with the design and validation of an SDN control application for class-based traffic recovery with load balancing. The features of the OpenFlow protocol have been exploited to timely detect link failures as well as to estimate links utilization. The performance of different strategies for class-based traffic recovery has been evaluated in an emulated environment, based on the widely used Mininet tool, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed solution in enterprise networks.