Designing a disaster-resilient network with software defined networking

With the wide deployment of network facilities and the increasing requirement of network reliability, the disruptive event like natural disaster, power outage or malicious attack has become a non-negligible threat to the current communication network. Such disruptive event can simultaneously destroy all devices in a specific geographical area and affect many network based applications for a long time. Hence, it is essential to build disaster-resilient network for future highly survivable communication services. In this paper, we focus on the integrated approach through the technique of software defined networking to mitigate disaster risks while cut down the investment and management costs. Our design consists of a sub-graph based proactive protection approach for fast rerouting at the network nodes and a splicing approach at the controller for effective post-disaster restoration. Such a systematic design is implemented in OpenFlow framework through the Mininet emulator and Nox controller. Numerical results show that our approach can achieve high reliability, fast recovery and low control overhead.