Facing the spectrum supply–demand gap, heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a promising approach to achieve drastic gains in network coverage and capacity compared with macro-only networks, thus making it especially attractive to network operators. On the other hand, software-defined networking brings a number of advantages along with many challenges. One particular concern is on the resilience for in-band fashioned control plane. Existing approaches mainly rely on a local rerouting policy when performing the routing protection for the target sessions in software-defined networks. However, such a policy would potentially bring congestions in the neighbouring links of the failed one. To this end, we study a weighted cost-minimization problem, where the traffic load balancing and control-channel setup cost are jointly considered. Because this problem is NP-hard, we first propose a near-optimal Markov approximation -based approach for in-band-fashioned software-defined HetNets. We then extend our solution to an online case that handles a single-link failure. We also conduct theoretical analysis on the performance fluctuation due to the single-link failure. We finally carry out experiments by experimental simulation. The extensive numerical results show that the proposed algorithm has fast convergence and high efficiency in resource utilization.