Local fast reroute with flow aggregation in software defined networks

In this letter, we propose a local fast reroute (LFR) algorithm with flow aggregation in software defined networks (SDN). In LFR, if a link failure is detected, all traffic flows affected by the failure are aggregated to be a new 'big' flow. Then, a local reroute path is dynamically deployed by the SDN controller for the aggregated flow. LFR reduces the number of flow operations between the SDN controller and switches. Numerical results show that the LFR enables fast recovery while minimizing the total number of flow entries in SDN.