Self-healing topology discovery protocol for software defined networks

Abstract

This letter presents the design of a self-healing protocol for automatic discovery and maintenance of the network topology in Software Defined Networks (SDN). The proposed protocol integrates two enhanced features (i.e. layer 2 topology discovery and autonomic fault recovery) in a unified mechanism. This novel approach is validated through simulation experiments using OMNET++. Obtained results show that our protocol discovers and recovers the control topology efficiently in terms of time and message load over a wide range of generated networks.