Combining source and destination-tag routing to handle fault tolerance in software-defined real-time mesh networks
Florian Greff, Ye‐Qiong Song, Laurent Ciarletta, Arnaud Samama · 2017
Software-Defined Real-Time Networking is an architecture for dynamic and incremental allocation of time-sensitive communication flows over embedded networks of various topologies and low-level properties. One of its major advantages is the ability to leverage the path redundancy provided by resilient (e.g. mesh) networks in order to recover from link or node failures through a flow reconfiguration process. However, it needs to be ensured that hard real-time packets will keep being delivered on time during this transient reconfiguration period. Anticipating every possible fault is very complex and can result in a waste of network resource. Our contribution combines optimized content-centric source routing in nominal mode with flexible and scalable destination-tag routing in transient recovery mode. We show the benefit of this approach in terms of flexibility and network resource utilization. We then detail our method for ensuring enforcement of real-time properties even during the transient reconfiguration period. Finally, we provide the necessary algorithms to extend the SDRN flow allocation and routing methods in order to implement this hybrid fault-tolerant extension.