Impact of nodal centrality measures to robustness in Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

The paper deals with the network robustness from the perspective of nodal centrality measures and its applicability in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Traditional graph characteristics have been evolving during the last century, and numerous of less-conventional metrics was introduced trying to bring a new view to some particular graph attributes. New control technologies can finally utilize these metrics but simultaneously show new challenges. SDN brings the fine-grained and nearly online view of the underlying network state which allows to implement an advanced routing and forwarding. In such situation, sophisticated algorithms can be applied utilizing pre-computed network measures. Since in recent version of SDN protocol OpenFlow (OF) has been revived an idea of the fast link failover, the authors in this paper introduce a novel metric, Quality of Alternative Paths centrality (QAP). The QAP value quantifies node surroundings and can be with an advantage utilized in algorithms to indicate more robust paths. The centrality is evaluated using the node-failure simulation at different network topologies in combination with the Quality of Backup centrality measure.