Semantic failover in software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) eases the management of large-scale network by providing centralized and programmable control of a network. The centralization inevitably creates a single point of failure and requires the use of redundant controllers. However, due to the need for replicating the SDN application states, existing solutions tend to assume that the controllers are of the same type. This imposes an undesirable trade-off between cost and availability as each active controller would require a dedicated standby controller of the same type. We propose semantic failover to address the issue, which allows generic failover across any types of controllers. Semantic failover models the SDN application states from the control plane messages and restores the application states by invoking the northbound API on the standby controller. It is thereby not dependent on specific types of controllers. The prototype system was tested on real-world SDN controllers, and the evaluation results have demonstrated the potentials of semantic failover for both homogenous and heterogeneous controller pairs.