Combining SDN and ICN for Network Survivability Improvement

Abstract

With the rapid development of Information Communication Technology (ICT), the traditional networks
are facing tremendous challenges. In recent years, the network security has been constantly
affected by various factors (e.g., the damages of natural disaster, network intrusion, and limited
properties of network). It is urgent to make some appropriate adjustments for current network architecture.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) bring
innovation, speediness in recovery and reconfiguration for network computing. SDN decouples the
forwarding plane from controlling plane, thus moving the control logic from a node to the central
controller for the real-time supervision. ICN separates the resources from the location, to make the
host-oriented model transform into content-centric model, which promotes the utilization of network
resources and relieves the explosive growth of network flow. In this paper, we present a novel safety
network model by applying SDN and ICN to the network recovery and reconfiguration. The proposed
model prevents the network congestion and monitors the network status in real time. The
system can be quickly restored after being damaged, which improves the network survivability. We
considered three scenarios (natural disaster, malicious damage, and system self-defect) to discuss the
proposed model. We simulated the situation where system was damaged and calculated the recovery
time. The simulation results show that recovery time of system is shorter in the proposed model than
in traditional network. Finally, we explore the broader perspectives for the network security.