Disaster-Aware Dynamic Routing for SDN-Based Multi-Site Data Center Networks

In recent years, cloud computing technology has been developing rapidly. As a result, the internal traffic of large-scale enterprises’ data centers has increased significantly. It has become important to improve the disaster tolerance capability of data centers to ensure user data security. However, the data center network relies on its physical infrastructure. Large-scale disasters may damage the infrastructure and cause huge data loss or connection interruption. Software-defined network (SDN) is an innovative network architecture that separates the control and forwarding layers of the network. Thus, SDN promotes network programmability and opens up new ways to design disaster-resistant networks. Based on SDN technology, we propose a disaster-aware dynamic routing (DADR) scheme. When a disaster signal is received, the SDN controller notifies the Global Server Load Balance (GSLB) device and stops declaring the IP of the disaster-stricken data center. At the same time, the SDN controller sends the server and client session information and the current traffic information of the disaster-stricken data center to other sites, where the optimal routing path is calculated for the data center based on the traffic characteristics by the proposed Lagrangian Relaxation based Bellman-Ford Parallel algorithm (LRBFP). Our results show that in the event of a disaster, based on the proposed DADR scheme and LRBFP algorithm, the packet loss rate and network delay can be greatly reduced.