Resiliency Challenges in Accelerating Carrier-Grade Networks with SDN
03 October 2016
This paper provides an initial understanding of the resiliency issues of future carrier-grade networks based on SDN. Our goal is to trigger more profound discussions on applying SDN to carrier-grade networks and inspire innovative SDN-based solutions for enhancing carrier-grade network resilience. To this end, we looked at 2 years of outages of carrier-grade networks. Our measurements identify the most critical failure patterns across several network devices (e.g., core routers, gateway and subscriber data managers), and allow us to extrapolate interesting examples of greater network outages. We then describe an architecture to implement future carrier-grade networks leveraging cloud computing and SDN. Finally, we fill the gap between the outage examples and described architecture to identify future resiliency challenges.
