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RetroFlow: maintaining control resiliency and flow programmability for software-defined WANs

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Zhi-Li ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

IWQoS '19: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality of Service

Article No.: 1, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3326285.3329036

Published: 24 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Providing resilient network control is a critical concern for deploying Software-Defined Networking (SDN) into Wide-Area Networks (WANs). For performance reasons, a Software-Defined WAN is divided into multiple domains controlled by multiple controllers with a logically centralized view. Under controller failures, we need to remap the control of offline switches from failed controllers to other active controllers. Existing solutions could either overload active controllers to interrupt their normal operations or degrade network performance because of increasing the controller-switch communication overhead. In this paper, we propose RetroFlow to achieve low communication overhead without interrupting the normal processing of active controllers during controller failures. By intelligently configuring a set of selected offline switches working under the legacy routing mode, RetroFlow relieves the active controllers from controlling the selected offline switches while maintaining the flow programmability (e.g., the ability to change paths of flows) of SDN. RetroFlow also smartly transfers the control of offline switches with the SDN routing mode to active controllers to minimize the communication overhead from these offline switches to the active controllers. Simulation results show that compared with the baseline algorithm, RetroFlow can reduce the communication overhead up to 52.6% during a moderate controller failure by recovering 100% flows from offline switches and can reduce the communication overhead up to 61.2% during a serious controller failure by setting to recover 90% of flows from offline switches.

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Cited By

Dou SGuo Z(2025)Maintaining Predictable Traffic Engineering Performance Under Controller Failures for Software-Defined WANsIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2025.352881443:2(524-536)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2025.3528814
Dou SQi LGuo ZChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)ARES: Predictable Traffic Engineering under Controller Failures in SD-WANsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645321(2703-2712)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645321
Guo ZLi CLi YDou SZhang BWu W(2024)Maintaining the Network Performance of Software-Defined WANs With Efficient Critical RoutingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333540421:2(2240-2252)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335404
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Index Terms

RetroFlow: maintaining control resiliency and flow programmability for software-defined WANs
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
    1. Maintainability and maintenance
2. Networks
  1. Network properties
    1. Network range
      1. Wide area networks
  2. Network services
    1. Programmable networks

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cover image ACM Other conferences

IWQoS '19: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Quality of Service

June 2019

420 pages

ISBN:9781450367783

DOI:10.1145/3326285

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 June 2019

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National Key Research and Development Program of China
China Scholarship Council
National Natural Science Foundation of China
National Science Foundation

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IWQoS '19

IWQoS '19: IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service

June 24 - 25, 2019

Arizona, Phoenix

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Cited By

Dou SGuo Z(2025)Maintaining Predictable Traffic Engineering Performance Under Controller Failures for Software-Defined WANsIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2025.352881443:2(524-536)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2025.3528814
Dou SQi LGuo ZChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)ARES: Predictable Traffic Engineering under Controller Failures in SD-WANsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645321(2703-2712)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645321
Guo ZLi CLi YDou SZhang BWu W(2024)Maintaining the Network Performance of Software-Defined WANs With Efficient Critical RoutingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333540421:2(2240-2252)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335404
Guo ZQi LDou SWeng JFu XXia Y(2024)Maintaining Control Resiliency for Traffic Engineering in SD-WANsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.339384132:4(3485-3498)Online publication date: Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3393841
Guo ZDou SJiang WXia Y(2024)Toward Improved Path Programmability Recovery for Software-Defined WANs Under Multiple Controller FailuresIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.328645632:1(143-158)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3286456
Dou SGuo Z(2024)Path Programmability Recovery under Controller Failures for SD-WANs: Recent Advances and Future Research ChallengesIEEE Communications Magazine10.1109/MCOM.001.230045962:11(100-106)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.001.2300459
Dou SQi LGuo Z(2024)Mitigating the impact of controller failures on QoS robustness for software-defined wide area networksComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2023.110096238(110096)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2023.110096
Feng WLiu CCheng BChen JWan Z(2023)An End-Host-Importance-Aware Secure Service-Enabled Hybrid SDN DeploymentIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.320869520:2(2056-2070)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2022.3208695
Guo ZDou SWu WXia Y(2023)Toward Flexible and Predictable Path Programmability Recovery Under Multiple Controller Failures in Software-Defined WANsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.322742331:5(1965-1980)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2022.3227423
Guo ZDou SLiu SFeng WJiang WXu YZhang Z(2022)Maintaining Control Resiliency and Flow Programmability in Software-Defined WANs During Controller FailuresIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.312877130:3(969-984)Online publication date: Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2021.3128771
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