Resilient SDN-Based Routing Against Rain Disruptions for Wireless Networks

Book chapter, 2020

Rain is a relatively frequent long-term event that can reduce the wireless networks throughput and availability. Depending on the rain rate, the communication link may fail completely, bringing about further instability problems of end-to-end paths. One of the effective solutions for reducing the impact of a long-term event such as rain is rerouting. However, the first step for mitigating these effects is to detect the presence and identify the type of long-term event to be able to act correctly. Therefore, it is vital to use an accurate and fast rain detection algorithm that can trigger the rerouting process. Throughout years, many algorithms were proposed to implement efficient and fast routing. Nowadays, software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm eases the deployment of centralized routing approaches by shifting the forwarding intelligence and management to a centralized controller and keeping the network elements as simple as possible. SDN is a promising solution that provides network programmability and facilitates dynamic quality-of-service provisioning. The global view captured by SDN eases reconfiguration and management of the whole backhaul network, which is particularly important in the case of large-scale disturbances of varying intensity and coverage due to weather. This chapter presents models for capturing the impact of rain on wireless channel attenuation, scrutinizes algorithms for rain detection, and discusses different rerouting approaches for mitigating the rain impact.