A Prototype of Network Failure Avoidance Functionality for SAGE Using OpenFlow

A tiled display wall (TDW), which is a single large display device composed of multiple sets of computers and displays, has recently gained the attention of scientists. In particular, SAGE, which is a middleware for building TDW, allows scientists to browse a multiple series of visualized results of computer simulation and analysis through the use of network streaming. Each visualized result can be generated on a different remote computer. For this reason SAGE has been increasingly hailed as a promising visualization technology that will solve the geographical distribution problem of computational and data resources. SAGE depends heavily on a network streaming technique in its architecture, but does not have any recovery mechanism against cases of network problems. This research, therefore, aims at realizing a network failure avoidance functionality for SAGE, focusing on OpenFlow against SAGE vulnerability to network failure. Specifically, the functionality is designed and developed as a composition of the following three functions: network failure detection, network topology understanding, and a packet forwarding control function. The key concept behind our design is that the network control function from OpenFlow should be built into SAGE. The evaluation in the paper confirms that the proposed and prototyped network failure avoidance functionality can detect failures on network routes and then reroute network streaming for visualization on TDW.