SPIDER: Fault Resilient SDN Pipeline with Recovery Delay Guarantees

TL;DR

SPIDER is a novel SDN pipeline design that guarantees rapid failure detection and recovery delays through switch-based link probing and fast reroute mechanisms, independent of controller reachability.

Contribution

It introduces a new SDN pipeline architecture enabling guaranteed short failure detection and recovery delays using switch-based probing and stateful data plane abstractions.

Findings

Achieves ms-level failure detection and recovery delays

Demonstrates effective performance with OpenState implementation

Reduces packet loss during network failures

Abstract

When dealing with node or link failures in Software Defined Networking (SDN), the network capability to establish an alternative path depends on controller reachability and on the round trip times (RTTs) between controller and involved switches. Moreover, current SDN data plane abstractions for failure detection (e.g. OpenFlow "Fast-failover") do not allow programmers to tweak switches' detection mechanism, thus leaving SDN operators still relying on proprietary management interfaces (when available) to achieve guaranteed detection and recovery delays. We propose SPIDER, an OpenFlow-like pipeline design that provides i) a detection mechanism based on switches' periodic link probing and ii) fast reroute of traffic flows even in case of distant failures, regardless of controller availability. SPIDER can be implemented using stateful data plane abstractions such as OpenState or Open vSwitch, and it offers guaranteed short (i.e. ms) failure detection and recovery delays, with a configurable trade off between overhead and failover responsiveness. We present here the SPIDER pipeline design, behavioral model, and analysis on flow tables' memory impact. We also implemented and experimentally validated SPIDER using OpenState (an OpenFlow 1.3 extension for stateful packet processing), showing numerical results on its performance in terms of recovery latency and packet losses.