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Automatic Configuration of Routing Control Platforms (RouteFlow) in OpenFlow Networks

This software automatically generates the virtual environment proposed for RouteFlow. The software is a modified version of RouteFlow (https://github.com/CPqD/RouteFlow/). This code is contributed by iMinds - Ghent University. The code is written in the part of work performed in the CityFlow project (www.cityflow.eu). For any question or bug, please report at Sachin.Sharma@intec.ugent.be.

Papers for Reference

For more information, please go through the following paper:

[1] Sachin Sharma, Dimitri Staessens, Didier Colle, Mario Pickavet and Piet Demeester, Automatic configuration of routing control platforms in OpenFlow networks, ACM SIGCOMM, Vol. 43(4), pp. 491-492, 2013

The other papers using this automatic configuration framework:

[1] Sachin Sharma, Dimitri Staessens, Didier Colle, David Palma, Joao Goncalves, Mario Pickavet, Luis Cordeiro, and Piet Demeester, Demonstrating Resilient Quality of Service in Software Defined Networking, IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 133-134, 2014

[2] Sachin Sharma, Dimitri Staessens, Didier Colle, David Palma, Joao Goncalves, Ricardo Figueiredo, Donal Morris, Mario Pickavet and Piet Demeester, Implementing Quality of Service for the Software Defined Networking Enabled Future Internet, EWSDN, 2014

[3] Joao Goncalves, David Palma, Luís Cordeiro, Sachin Sharma, Didier Colle and Adam Carter, Software-Defined Networking: Guidelines for Experimentation and Validation in Large-Scale Real World Scenarios, 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Innovative Ways for Video-to-Video Communications in Modern Smart Cities, 2014

Software Overview

This software contains five different components:

  1. RF-controller: It runs RouteFlow without any manual configuration of VMs (Linux Containers, LXCs).
  2. Topology controller: It runs a topology discovery module and requires very little manual configurations. An administrator can provide following configurations to the topology controller:

a) Range of IP addresses for the virtual environment: With this option, the administrator can specify the range of IP addresses (minimum and maximum IP address) for the virtual environment. When the topology discovery module discovers an OpenFlow link, the module chooses the IP addresses of the corresponding ports in the virtual environment from this range of IP addresses.

b) Protocol Specific Parameters: With this option, the administrator can specify the types of protocols (e.g. OSPF, BGP etc) that need to run in the virtual environment. In addition, the administration can specify the protocol specific parameters such as the OSPF network address, the hello interval, and the router dead interval. Note that this software currently works only for OSPF. The work to make it working for other protocols is in progress.

c) IP addresses for the non-OpenFlow links: In OpenFlow networks, some of the ports of an OpenFlow switch can be connected to hosts or switches, which are not controlled by the same controller. The administrator can assign addresses to those ports using this option.

d) IP addresses for the control interfaces of the virtual environment: With this option, the administrator can specify the range of IP addresses for the control interfaces of the virtual machines (e.g. LXCs). When the topology controller discovers a switch, it chooses the control IP address of the corresponding VM from this range of IP addresses.

In addition, the administrator can specify the address of the RPC server (please see the next components)

  1. RPC (remote procedural call) client: It collects configuration information from the topology controller and sends this to a server called RPC server.

  2. RPC server: It resides in the RF-controller and configures RouteFlow on reception of configuration messages from the RPC client.

  3. FlowVisor: It acts as a proxy server between a switch and controllers (the topology controller and the RF-controller in our framework).

Building

Automatic Configuration of RouteFlow is currently tested on Ubuntu 12.04.

  1. Install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libboost-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-filesystem-dev iproute-dev openvswitch-switch mongodb python-pymongo lxc ant openjdk-6-jdk python-pexpect python-ipaddr

  1. Clone RouteFlow automatic configuration repository from the GitHub:

    git clone ...

  2. build rfclient:

    cd "the cloned directory"

    make rfclient

  3. build flowvisor

    cd FLOWVISOR

    make

Steps to run Automatic Configuration

Before running RouteFlow, we need to write a configuration file for the topology controller, as described in Section "Software Overview". A sample file (CONFFILE) is present in folder POX_CONTROLLER:

RPCSERVER,http,127.0.0.1,8000,
IPADDRESS_RANGE,172.0.10.1,255.255.255.0,172.100.10.2,255.255.255.0
CONT_IP_ADDRESS,192.169.1.101,255.255.255.0,192.169.1.255,255.255.255.0
PROTOCOL,OSPF,ZEBRA,OSPF,OSPF
OSPF_PARAMETERS,172.0.0.0,8,10,40
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-01,1,172.168.1.1,24
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-02,1,172.168.2.1,24
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-03,1,172.168.3.1,24
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-04,1,172.168.4.1,24
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-05,1,172.168.5.1,24
SDPID,00-00-00-00-00-06,1,172.168.6.1,24
  1. The RPCSERVER line gives the information about about RPCSERVER i.e. IP Address, port number etc.
  2. The IP ADDRESS_RANGE line gives the range of IP addresses from which IP addresses for an OpenFlow link (both ports of the link) will be chosen.
  3. The CONT_IP_ADDRESS line gives the range of IP addresses from which an IP address for the control interface of a VM (LXC) will be chosen.
  4. The PROTOCOL line gives the information about the protocols that need to run in an OpenFlow network e.g. OSPF, ZEBRA etc.
  5. The OSPF_PARAMETER line gives the information about OSPF parameters such as OSPF network address, network mask length, hello interval, and router dead interval.
  6. The SPID line gives the information about the external links connected with the OpenFlow network. For example, the first SPID line tells the topology controller that the first port of dpid 00-00-00-00-00-01 should have an IP address 172.168.1.1/24

After writing the above configuration, we can run a script (called as rfauto) provided in the rftest folder:

sudo ./rfauto

This script will automatically run flowvisor, topology controller and routeflow.

For the flowvisor, config.xml is present in folder FLOWVISOR. It creates two slices: one for RouteFlow and other for Topology Controller. With this config file, flowvisor listens on 6600. For the slices information, you can run the following command: ./scripts/fvctl.sh listSlices or any other command listed in http://archive.openflow.org/wk/index.php/OpenFlowGEC9Tutorial#Slice_your_network.

After these steps, you can start an OpenFlow network either using mininet or using a physical network. Please keep in mind that as flowvisor in above config file listens on 6600, please specify the controller port number as 6600 in the mininet or in the physical network. You can ofcourse change this number (if required).

For login into lxcs(vm), username is "root" and no password is required.