Minimum Candidate Selection Algorithm for Hybrid IP/SDN Networks With Single Link Failures

We study the problem of candidate selection in hybrid Internet Protocol (IP)/Software Defined Networks (SDN) for the case of Single Link Failures (SLFs). We propose an algorithm called Minimum Candidates Selection (MCS) that considers all possible shortest paths between all pairs of nodes in the network to minimize the number of SDN candidates needed to protect all SLFs. We demonstrate the performance of the MCS scheme in terms of repair path length and maximum link utilisation. By implementing the proposed MCS algorithm on various real world as well as random network topologies we show its advantage over the existing algorithms.