Improving the reliability of Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed software-defined networks

This paper presents a method to improve the reliability and fault tolerance of distributed software-defined networks. This method is called “BIRDSDN (Byzantine-Resilient Improved Reliable Distributed Software-Defined Networks).” In BIRDSDN, a group communication is implemented among the controllers of the whole clusters. This method can detect the crash failure and Byzantine failure of any controller and undertakes a fast detection and recovery scheme to select the controllers to take over the orphan switches. BIRDSDN takes into account the reliability of the nodes considering the failure probability of intracluster and intercluster links, topology, load, and latency. The numerical results show that this approach performs better than the other approaches regarding failure detection, recovery, latency, throughput, reliability, and packet loss.