A novel protection design for OpenFlow-based networks

Network protection against link failure is required to allow packets to reach the destination with minimal packet loss when the failure occurs. When a link fails, traffic that attempts using the failed link is interrupted. Typically, routers in the network discover the failure and find a new route to bypass the failed link. Alternative well-known segment protection schemes can also be used to speed up the link recovery time, by re-routing packets locally through pre-calculated protection paths. However, several backup paths have to be prepared for each primary path, making path configuration rather complex and poorly scalable. In this paper, we propose a network protection mechanism aiming at reducing the complexity of the path configuration process, based on OpenFlow. The performance of the proposed design is compared to that of an existing OpenFlow-based segment protection mechanism. Results show that our design can reduce by about 60% the number of flow entries and by 75% the number of configuration messages, leading to a substantial reduction in memory and CPU usage on each OpenFlow switch.