SD-FFR: Software Defined Fast Failure Recovery Mechanism in the Automatic Warehouse

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of IoT technology, automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) interact with an industrial control system (ICS) through the wireless network to support the freight distribution in the automated warehouse. However, the message exchange among AGVs and the ICS would experience large packet loss or long transmission delay, in the presence of wireless network link failure and link congestion. Therefore, the performance of warehouse automation would be degraded. In this paper, we propose the Software Defined Fast Failure Recovery (SD-FFR) mechanism, aiming to improve network reliability and avoid link congestion caused by load unbalance. With SD-FFR, when link failure occurs, the SDN controller actively detects the link failure within milliseconds, and then reroutes the affected traffic flows accordingly. The proposed SD-FFR mechanism also takes load balance into consideration in selecting routing paths when a new traffic flow joins or link failure occurs in the network. The evaluation results show that network performance can be time efficiently improved.