Design of an In-Band Control Plane for Automatic Bootstrapping and Fast Failure Recovery in P4 Networks

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management Vol. 20; no. 3; p. 1
• Main Authors: Wong, Ting-Shan, Lee, Steven S. W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-09-2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; automatic network bootstrapping; Control systems; Failure; fast failover; in-band control; Monitoring; Network topology; P4 network; Recovery time; Software-defined networking; Switches; TCPIP; Topology; Transport protocols
• ISSN: 1932-4537; 1932-4537
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2023.3242222

In this paper, we present the design of an in-band control plane system for P4 networks. The proposed in-band control plane performs automatic switch bootstrapping, network status monitoring, topology discovery and fast failover. The authentication and registration of newly connected switches are managed by the controller without manual intervention. The system can recover from any single link or single node failure in a short period of time. The recovery control paths for each single link and single node failure are prepared in advance. We propose an algorithm that takes recovery time into account for preplanning the recovery paths. In addition to handling any single failure, the proposed control plane is survivable even if there are multiple failures in the network. We implement an emulated network to evaluate the proposed control plane system. The experimental results show that the system successfully provides all the target functions.