  With the wide deployment of network facilities and the increasing requirement
of network reliability, the disruptive event like natural disaster, power
outage or malicious attack has become a non-negligible threat to the current
communication network. Such disruptive event can simultaneously destroy all
devices in a specific geographical area and affect many network based
applications for a long time. Hence, it is essential to build
disaster-resilient network for future highly survivable communication services.
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing a highly resilient network
through the technique of SDN (Software Defined Networking). In contrast to the
conventional idea of handling all the failures on the control plane (the
controller), we focus on an integrated design to mitigate disaster risks by
adding some redundant functions on the data plane. Our design consists of a
sub-graph based proactive protection approach on the data plane and a splicing
approach at the controller for effective restoration on the control plane. Such
a systematic design is implemented in the OpenFlow framework through the
Mininet emulator and Nox controller. Numerical results show that our approach
can achieve high robustness with low control overhead.
