Recent proposals on Data Center Networks (DCN) are based on centralized control and a logical network fabric following a well-controlled baseline topology. The architectural split of control and data planes and the new control plane abstractions have been touted as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), where the OpenFlow protocol is one common choice for the standardized programmatic interface to data plane devices. In this context, source routing has been proposed as a way to provide scalability, forwarding flexibility and simplicity in the data plane. One major caveat of source routing is network failure events, which require informing the source node and can take at least on the order of one RTT to the controller. This paper presents SlickFlow, a resilient source routing approach implemented with OpenFlow that allows fast failure recovery by combining source routing with alternative path information carried in the packet header. A primary and alternative paths are compactly encoded as a sequence of segments written in packet header fields. Under the presence of failures along a primary path, packets can be rerouted to alternative paths by the switches themselves without involving the controller. We evaluate SlickFlow on a prototype implementation based on Open vSwitch and demonstrate its effectiveness in a Mininet emulated scenario for fat-tree, BCube, and DCell topologies. © 2013 IEEE. 606613CSIRO,Google,IEEE Computer Soc. TCCC,IEEE Computer Society,NICTA,University of New South Wales(2013) Amazon.Com Web Services: Products and Services, , http://aws.amazon.com/products, Available at: Last visited on: MarchArmbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A.D., Katz, R.H., Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Zaharia, M., (2009) Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, , Technical Report UCB/EECS-2009-2028 University of California at Berkeley, California, U.S.A, FebruaryBocek, T., Hunt, E., Hausheer, D., Stiller, B., Fast similarity search in peer-to-peer networks (2008) 11th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS, pp. 240-247. , 10.1109/NOMS.2008.4575140, Salvador Brazil, April 2008(2013) Dropbox: Dropbox Service, , Available at: Dropbox.com. March(2013) Google Corporate: Google Products and Solutions, , http://google.com/intl/en/about/products, Available at:Last visited at: MarchIetf: A universally unique identifier (uuid) urn namespace (2005) RFC 4122, , http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122, July, March 2013(2013) ID3 Website: ID3 Version 2 Standard, , Available at: Id3.org. May(2013) JSON-RPC Website Specification: A Light Weight Remote Procedure Call Protocol, Specification 2.0, , Available at: Jsonrpc.org. AprilKessler, G.C., An overview of steganography for the computer forensics examiner (2004) Technical Report Gary Kessler Associates, , http://www.garykessler.net/library/fsc-stego.html, FebruaryLevenshtein, V.I., Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals (1966) Soviet Physics Doklady, 10 (8), pp. 707-710. , FebruaryLi, Z., Xie, G., Hwang, K., Li, Z., Churn-Resilient: Protocol for massive data dissemination in p2p networks IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems, 22 (8), pp. 1342-1349. , August 2011 doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2011.15Lua, E.K., Crowcroft, J., Pias, M., Sharma, R., Lim, S., A survey and comparison of peer-to-peer overlay network schemes (2005) IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 7 (2), pp. 72-93Machado, G.S., Hecht, F., Waldburger, M., Stiller, B., Bypassing cloud providers data validation to store arbitrary data. 13th ifip (2013) IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2013, , Ghent, Belgium, May(2013), http://skydrive.com, March Microsoft: SkyDrive Files Anywhere(2013) OAuth Specification: OAuth 2.0 Specification, , http://oauth.net/2, Available at:Last visited on: March(2013) Otixo: All Your Cloud Files from a Single Login, , http://otixo.com, Available at:Last visited on: March(2013) PiCsMu Website: Platform-independent Cloud Storage System for Multiple Usage, , http://www.pics.mu, Available at:May(2010) SalesForce.Com: The Leader of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Cloud Computing, , http://www.salesforce.com, Available at:Last visited on February(2013) SpiderOak: Private Online Backup and Sharing, , https://spideroak.com, Available at:Last visited on: March(2013) TomP2P Website: A P2P-based High Performance Key-value Pair Storage Library, , http://tomp2p.net, Available at:March(2013) Wikipedia: Megaupload, , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload, Available at:Last visited on: March(2013) Wuala: Secure Storage Service, , Available at: Wuala.com. March