ONS2016

Software-defined networking (SDN) promises a networking utopia by separating the control plane from the physical network topology to create an environment wherein all switches and routers take their traffic forwarding cues from a centralized management controller.

This talk is centered on Aricent’s approach of building applications on top of the commercial of the shelf controllers, which forms the top tier of the three tier architecture; where applications directs security, management and other specific functions through the controller.

The approach, which is a path for building scalable applications that provides an alternate way of provisioning, monitoring and controlling the transport network. Many network equipment vendors have announced support for OpenFlow and the talk will build the use case around them. Center around an instant VPN (I-VPN) application providing connectivity between multiple sites of a service provider/enterprise network, very similar to the traditional MPLS VPN without the need to run complex protocols on the nodes. An application suite comprising of load balancing, bandwidth management and monitoring applications details how the complex process of VPN management is simplified in the new paradigm.

Building scalable applications address the following:

Application: The main intelligence block responsible for shaping network traffic depending on the application involved VPN, BoD, and Network Balancing. How they can be controlled by the higher level controlling function namely the Orchestration Layer. It will touch on the North Bound Interface and how it controls the Application and the issues and challenges in designing this interface.

Controller: The talk will center on OpenDaylight (ODL). How it is leveraged to build the transport applications? The adapter concept which makes the applications controller agnostic. The application was built long before the support for similar function was available on ODL and will highlight how this application is sufficiently decoupled to extend to other use cases namely the transport SDN and not necessarily target the datacenter use cases. It will capture some of the challenges we faced in migrating the application across controllers from Floodlight to HP VAN and ODL and possible to ONOS in the future. It will touch upon our view as to what should be minimum available support from the controller which gives the necessary flexibility.

Switches: The OpenFlow Switches. The challenges and issue faced in crafting a solution in building application that can work on top of OpenFlow 1.3 as supported by OVS, Broadcom OFDPA running on top of Trident plus, and an implementation of OpenFlow on top of Intel DPDK Platform.