Design of an In-Band Control Plane for Automatic Bootstrapping and Fast Failure Recovery in P4 Networks

In this paper, we present the design of an in-band control plane system for P4 networks. The proposed in-band control plane performs automatic switch bootstrapping, network status monitoring, topology discovery and fast failover. The authentication and registration of newly connected switches are managed by the controller without manual intervention. The system can recover from any single link or single node failure in a short period of time. The recovery control paths for each single link and single node failure are prepared in advance. We propose an algorithm that takes recovery time into account for preplanning the recovery paths. In addition to handling any single failure, the proposed control plane is survivable even if there are multiple failures in the network. We implement an emulated network to evaluate the proposed control plane system. The experimental results show that the system successfully provides all the target functions.