Applying a Modified Triple Modular Redundancy Mechanism to Enhance the Reliability in Software-Defined Network
Baharak HassanVandi, Reza Kurdi, Mohammad Trik
Abstract
Software-Defined Networks are a new architecture of computer networks where network intelligence is logically focused on base software controllers, and network hardware becomes a simple device that is programmable via an interface. Indeed, software-defined networks bring new features such as routing, measurement, and monitoring through providing a global vision of the network. One of the major challenges in these software-defined networks is the discussion of fault tolerance and reliability because if the control unit fails in these networks for any reason, the entire network will impair. Therefore, to maintain reliability in this study, the redundancy feature, according to the Triple Modular Redundancy mechanism was used in the control unit. Accordingly, instead of a single control unit, several control units have been used as plugin to increase reliability in software-defined networks in addition to fault tolerance. Finally, through a series of experiments to evaluate the performance improvement at the error time, it was shown that multi-control topology, compared to single-control topology, could stop 18% of lost packets between hosts and also improve 4% of packets discarded by the switch on average.