SDX - The Software Defined Exchange a presentation by Russ Clark and Muhammad Shahbaz, Georgia Tech at US Ignite ONF GENI Workshop on October 8, 2013

1. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology
SDX - The Software
Defined Exchange
Russ Clark and Muhammad Shahbaz
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
With Many Others:
Nick Feamster, Ron Hutchins,
Arpit Gupta, Hyojoon Kim,
Laurent Vanbever, Jen Rexford – Princeton
Scott Shenker – UC Berkeley

2. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 2
General Goals For SDN
• More Control Of Our Network!
• Active Control Plane – not just during maintenance!
• Policy Management
• better than VLANs, Subnets, Firewalls, IDS, IPS, etc
• Active Projects in:
• Network access control
• Wide-area video distribution
• Capacity Monitoring and Management
• Simplified Configuration - “virtual patch panel”
• Security, Data Privacy
• Better Student Projects!!!

3. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 3
The Internet Exchange
• Peering is critical to the Internet
• Impossible to manage the entire Internet as a single entity
• Must be broken up into Autonomous Systems
• Managed by different entities with different business needs
• Implementation of peering requires both:
• Business relationships
• Technical solutions – e.g. BGP
• The Internet Exchange Point or IXP
• A single, large peering site where multiple providers come
together

4. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 4
Limitations of BGP
• Limited Policy Expression
• Routing based only on Destination IP
• Single-hop influence radius
• Operators want more:
• Application specific
• Multi-hop influence
• Support for more complex business relationships

5. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 5
SDN in the IXP
• Initial focus is on SDN within the IXP
• This is a practical starting point
• We think there are interesting things to be done
• Leverage SDN to support richer policy expression
• Make packet forwarding decisions based on more than just
the destination IP address
• The SDX – A Software Defined IXP

6. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 6
SDX Architecture

7. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 7
What SDX Could Use from OpenFlow
• Re-entrant Packet Processing
• With multiple policies to apply, it would be useful to allow
some packets to be “re-evaluated” by the switch after initial
application of rules
• Cross-domain Control
• A notion of “Barrier” across: multiple switches and multiple
administrative domains
• Without this, we’ve only just begun to explore how to do
SDN between exchanges

8. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 8
SDX Progress
• Built an SDX controller for IXPs
• Deployment at ColoATL
• Next steps: (1) Peering with Internet2, ES.Net and others,
(2) Extension to multiple sites.
• Selected for the Internet2 Innovation Award 2013
• Press Release:
http://www.internet2.edu/network/innovative-application-
awards.html
• GitHub repository: https://github.com/sdn-
ixp/internet2award

9. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 9
Acknowledgments
• This work made possible by:

10. © 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 9
Acknowledgments
• This work made possible by: