Designing a Disaster-resilient Network with Software Defined Networking

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel disaster-resilient network design using SDN, combining data plane redundancy and control plane splicing to enhance survivability against natural disasters and attacks.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated SDN-based approach with data plane redundancy and control plane splicing for disaster resilience, implemented in OpenFlow and validated through simulations.

Findings

Achieves high robustness with low control overhead.

Effective disaster mitigation through combined data and control plane strategies.

Validated approach demonstrates improved survivability in simulated environments.

Abstract

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 consider the problem of designing a highly resilient network through the technique of SDN (Software Defined Networking). In contrast to the conventional idea of handling all the failures on the control plane (the controller), we focus on an integrated design to mitigate disaster risks by adding some redundant functions on the data plane. Our design consists of a sub-graph based proactive protection approach on the data plane and a splicing approach at the controller for effective restoration on the control plane. Such a systematic design is implemented in the OpenFlow framework through the Mininet emulator and Nox controller. Numerical results show that our approach can achieve high robustness with low control overhead.