Link failure handling and controller memory overhead elimination in SDN through source path routing model technique

With the basic principle of separating control and data planes, software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising paradigm. The separation generates a variety of scaling concerns (e.g., higher reaction time, overhead on the controller). As more nodes are connected in the SDN, the routing process becomes tedious. The traditional reactive method of routing provides dynamic link finding through network state information, which leads to high computation overhead on the SDN controller and low link utilization and throughput. The proactive method in the source path routing method (SPRM) simply provides one backup path for routing. But this is not efficient in handling link failures. Our focus is on reducing the memory overhead caused by link failures in the data and control plane, through the proposed modified source path routing model (SPRM) technique. This method also improves the execution time by making the proactive phase compute k paths and allowing the reactive phase to choose an efficient path from the pre-installed k paths, thereby choosing a backup path which is next best efficient for routing. Our simulation studies show an improvement of 22.5% in link utilization and throughput in the presence of link failures for the proposed method.