Migrating From Legacy to Software Defined Networks: A Network Reliability Perspective

Designing survivable communication networks to achieve carrier-grade five-nines reliability is of paramount importance for the network operators. This article addresses service reliability and its related aspects such as nodal reachability, network connectivity, and edge-disjoint routing in both tra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on reliability 2021-12, Vol.70 (4), p.1525-1541
Main Authors: Al Mtawa, Yaser, Haque, Anwar, Lutfiyya, Hanan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communication networks
Legacy network
Network reliability
Network topology
Operators
Performance evaluation
Quality of service
quality of service (QoS)
Reliability analysis
Reliability aspects
Robustness
Routing
Software defined networking
software defined networking (SDN)
Software reliability
Time factors
Topology
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Summary:Designing survivable communication networks to achieve carrier-grade five-nines reliability is of paramount importance for the network operators. This article addresses service reliability and its related aspects such as nodal reachability, network connectivity, and edge-disjoint routing in both traditional networks and software defined networks (SDNs). The proposed roadmap is based on two phases: Fundamental analytical phase and performance evaluation phase. In the first phase, a graph operator is defined to analyze the characteristics of the reliability metric and its associated reachability feature. This phase will focus on both the macro- and micro-level properties of reliability. In the second phase, we exploit the analysis in the former phase to get an insight into the performance evaluation of traditional and SDN-based networks against the reliability metric, and then calculate the statistical significance of the mean difference of their reliability values. Reliability under edge-disjoint paths to avoid resource competition is also investigated. Various types of topologies are utilized to test the service reliability of both architecture designs. Extensive simulation results show that SDN-based networks have comparable performance to its legacy counterpart against the operational reliability metric. Our findings not only shed light on enhancing reliability using edge-disjoint paths under link failure scenarios but also expected to benefit the operators to achieve their service level objectives while migrating from legacy to SDN-based platform.
ISSN:0018-9529
1558-1721
DOI:10.1109/TR.2021.3066526