Predictive Forwarding Rule Caching for Latency Reduction in Dynamic SDN

Abstract

In mission-critical environments such as industrial and military settings, the use of unmanned vehicles is on the rise. These scenarios typically involve a ground control system (GCS) and nodes such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The GCS and nodes exchange different types of information, including control data that direct unmanned vehicle movements and sensor data that capture real-world environmental conditions. The GCS and nodes communicate wirelessly, leading to loss or delays in control and sensor data. Minimizing these issues is crucial to ensure nodes operate as intended over wireless links. In dynamic networks, distributed path calculation methods lead to increased network traffic, as each node independently exchanges control messages to discover new routes. This heightened traffic results in internal interference, causing communication delays and data loss. In contrast, software-defined networking (SDN) offers a centralized approach by calculating paths for all nodes from a single point, reducing network traffic. However, shifting from a distributed to a centralized approach with SDN does not inherently guarantee faster route creation. The speed of generating new routes remains independent of whether the approach is centralized, so SDN does not always lead to faster results. Therefore, a key challenge remains: determining how to create new routes as quickly as possible even within an SDN framework. This paper introduces a caching technique for forwarding rules based on predicted link states in SDN, which was named the CRIMSON (Cashing Routing Information in Mobile SDN Network) algorithm. The CRIMSON algorithm detects network link state changes caused by node mobility and caches new forwarding rules based on predicted topology changes. We validated that the CRIMSON algorithm consistently reduces end-to-end latency by an average of 88.96% and 59.49% compared to conventional reactive and proactive modes, respectively. © 2024 by the authors.