Kirill Kogan Purdue University Research Track Session Part 1 ONS2015: http://bit.ly/ons2015sd ONS Inspire! Webinars: http://bit.ly/oiw-sd Watch the talk (video) on ONS Content Archives: http://bit.ly/ons-archives-sd

3. Serial Composition of
Heterogeneous Control Planes
Kirill Kogan
Purdue University
with Advait Dixit and Patrick Eugster

4. SDN view
2
SDN Controller Platform
Logically
centralized
network
control
Southbound API
How should we introduce new services?
S1 S2 SN
…
S3
Northbound API

5. Flexibility of Controllers
• Majority of controllers are monolithic.
• [Beacon] allows dynamic addition of services
(but all services are written in Java and require
beacon’s API).
• [Yanc] exposes network configuration using the file
system (services can be written in any language but
requires Yanc’s file system layout).
• [HotSwap] supports upgrade from one version to
the other.
3

6. SDN view
4
SDN Controller Platform
S1 S2 SN
…
S3
Standardization of
Northbound API ?

7. Parallel Composition of Controllers
(resolved)
5
SDN Controller 1
S11 S12 S1N
…
SDN Controller 2
S21 S22 S2M
…
[FlowVisor]

8. Problem statement
Problem: Given a set of desired services implemented
on different types of OpenFlow controllers, apply a
serial composition of the desired services on the
same traffic.
Requirements:
1. Only the South-bound API is standardized.
2. No code changes in implementing controllers.
3. A composition is built in config time.
6

9. Serial Composition of Controllers
7
SDN Controller C1
S11 S12 S1K
…
SDN Controller CN
SN1 SN2 SNM
…
FlowBricks
…
fence

10. Example of Serial Composition
8
C1
QoS
FlowBricks
C2
NAT
C3
Routing

11. OpenFlow Limitations
• No explicit packet drop action.
• Non feasible to implement fence (solution:
introduction of Ececute-Actions Instruction).
• Packet processing cannot go from a higher
flow table number to a lower one (that limits a
number of potential policies in FlowBricks).
9

12. Our Contribution
• Implemented FlowBricks on top of FloodLight.
• We conducted experiments to show that FlowBricks does not
impact significantly response time and scalability.
• We plan to address space time tradeoff similarly to [SST].
Implementation:
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dixit0/flowbricks.tgz
10

13. References
[Beacon] The Beacon OpenFlow Controller’
[Yanc] Applying Operating Systems Principles to SDN
Controller Design’
[HotSwap] HotSwap: Correct and Efficient Controller
Upgrades for Software-Defined Networks
[FlowVisor] Can the Production Network be the Testbed
[Pyretic] Composing Software-Defined Networks
[SST] Space and Speed Tradeoffs in TCAM Hierarchical
Packet Classification
11

14. Backup Slides
12

15. Concatenation of Flow Tables
13