P4-FastReroute: Emulation-Validated Autonomous Recovery from Hard and Soft Failures in Programmable Networks

Barzan Abdulazeez Idrees

Abstract


Modern latency-critical applications including 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), industrial control systems, and high-frequency trading demand sub-millisecond network failure recovery. Existing mechanisms fall short: control-plane approaches such as OSPF, BGP, and reactive SDN exhibit recovery windows of 50 ms to 40 s, while data-plane fast reroute schemes handle hard failures but remain blind to soft failures links that are physically up but functionally degraded due to high latency or packet loss. This paper presents P4-FastReroute, a data-plane-native framework addressing both failure classes without control-plane involvement. Hard failures are dealt with instantly with P4 Fast Failover (FF) groups. Soft failures are managed by a stateful in-band probing engine that computes the round-trip time of probes with ingress_global_timestamp, counts the number of times probes are timed out in a row per path, and initiates autonomous rerouting when the miss threshold ω is surpassed. Path oscillation is avoided with a three-state finite-state machine (Healthy, Failing, Recovering). All results reported in this paper were obtained through software emulation using BMv2/Mininet, no hardware experiments were conducted. Evaluation on Mininet/BMv2 using Diamond and Fat-Tree (k = 4) topologies confirms all design goals. Hard-failure recovery completes in 112 µs (σ < 5 µs) — 840× faster than reactive SDN and 357,143× faster than standard OSPF. Soft-failure detection under 200 ms latency injection completes in 31 ms (σ ≈ 2 ms), while OSPF + BFD fails to detect the event entirely. All reported results are emulation measurements, deployment on physical programmable switch hardware is identified as the primary direction for future work.

Keywords


autonomous recovery; fast reroute; P4; Programmable data planes; Software-Defined Networking

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.32520/stmsi.v15i9.6868

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