Automatic Configuration of
Routing Control Platforms in
OpenFlow Networks
ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference
Author:Sachin Sharma, Dimitri
Staessens, Didier Colle, Mario
Pickavet and Piet Demeester
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Outline
• Introduction
– What is OpenFlow?
– What is RouteFlow?
– The current problem
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Architectural
Automatic configuration
Experiments
Conclusion
Reference
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Introduction
• What is OpenFlow?
– OpenFlow is a communication protocol that
enables SDN(Software-defined networking) by
getting access to the control plane of the switch or
router.
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Introduction Cont.
• What is RouteFlow?
– An open source project to provide IP routing
services in OpenFlow networks.
– OpenFlow hardware needs Flow tables to make
forwarding decisions.
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Introduction Cont.
• The current problem:
– Administrator needs to devote a lot of time
(typically 7 hours for 28 switches) in manual
configurations.
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Architectural
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Architectural Cont.
• Virtual network environment
– Each VM (virtual machine) maps to one
OpenFlow hardware.
– Each VM runs one instance of the IP routing
engine (Any linux based routing engine: e.g.
Quagga).
• OVS (Open vSwitch)
– A software switch that supports OpenFlow.
– Depends on the RouteFlow controller to make the
decisions.
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Architectural Cont.
• RouteFlow Controller (RF-C)
– Controller : NOX controller .
– Sends packets and events its receives from OVS
and OpenFlow hardware to RouteFlow Server.
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Architectural Cont.
• RouteFlow Server (RF-Server)
– Keeps the core logic of the system.
– Receives the registered events from the RF-C and
takes decisions over those events (e.g. packet-in,
datapath- join).
– Also receives information about route changes
from the rf-slave running in the quagga vms,
which will trigger a flow install/modification in the
corresponding OpenFlow switch.
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Architectural Cont.
• RouteFlow Slave (RF-Slave)
– FIB(forwarding information base) : IP and ARP
tables are collected (using the Linux Netlink API)
and then translated into OpenFlow tuples.
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Automatic configuration
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Experiments
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Conclusion
• The proposed framework to automatically
configure RouteFlow in OpenFlow networks.
• There is a large difference between automatic
and manual configurations of RouteFlow.
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Reference
• RouteFlow
– https://sites.google.com/site/routeflow/
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