A Proactive-Restoration Technique for SDNs

Failure incidents result in temporarily preventing the network from delivering services properly. Such a deterioration in services called service unavailability. The traditional fault management techniques, i.e. protection and restoration, are inevitably concerned with service unavailability due to the convergence time that is required to achieve the recovery when a failure occurs. However, with the global view feature of software-defined networking a failure prediction is becoming attainable, which in turn reduces the service interruptions that originated by failures. In this paper, we propose a proactive restoration technique that reconfigure the vulnerable routes which are likely to be affected if the predicted failure indeed occurs. The proposed approach allocates the alternative routes based on the probability of failure. Experimental evaluation on real-world and synthetic topologies demonstrates that the network service availability can be improved with the proposed technique to reach up to 97%. Based on the obtained results, further directions are suggested towards achieving further advances in this research area.