  When dealing with node or link failures in Software Defined Networking (SDN),
the network capability to establish an alternative path depends on controller
reachability and on the round trip times (RTTs) between controller and involved
switches. Moreover, current SDN data plane abstractions for failure detection
(e.g. OpenFlow "Fast-failover") do not allow programmers to tweak switches'
detection mechanism, thus leaving SDN operators still relying on proprietary
management interfaces (when available) to achieve guaranteed detection and
recovery delays. We propose SPIDER, an OpenFlow-like pipeline design that
provides i) a detection mechanism based on switches' periodic link probing and
ii) fast reroute of traffic flows even in case of distant failures, regardless
of controller availability. SPIDER can be implemented using stateful data plane
abstractions such as OpenState or Open vSwitch, and it offers guaranteed short
(i.e. ms) failure detection and recovery delays, with a configurable trade off
between overhead and failover responsiveness. We present here the SPIDER
pipeline design, behavioral model, and analysis on flow tables' memory impact.
We also implemented and experimentally validated SPIDER using OpenState (an
OpenFlow 1.3 extension for stateful packet processing), showing numerical
results on its performance in terms of recovery latency and packet losses.
