Fault-Tolerance in Software Defined Networking

Software defined networking (SDN), decouples the control from the forwarding plane thereby making the network more programmable and able to adapt to real-time traffic conditions. Separation of the control, data and applications however, introduces several attributes that are prone to failure. Failiures can occur at the control, data or even in the application plane, that may lead to unpredictable network behaviour. Research at CIMACS focuses on making each of the SDN layers robust to deal with general failures. Key projects are detailed as follows.

Control Plane Fault-Tolerance The research focuses on increasing fault tolerance in the SDN control plane (controller). Various algorithms are being tested for this purpose while keeping the network latency to a minimum and maximizing reliability and resilience.

Application Policy Consistency Errors in policy implementation at the Northbound interface can lead to conflicts among services and sub-optimal network configurations. A policy broker was therefore, constructed to reduce conflicts among applications relying on automated profiling and offering ease of SDN management. The policy broker methodology has been published in Dyanmic Policy Creation & Conflict Resolution in SDN.

Failure Simulation To stress test SDN environments, the project entails the development of several test scenarios to evaluate the SDN components that are prone to failure and require a greater degree of fault-tolernace. The results will be published in conference/journal papers once available.