An ONOS-based software-defined peering router has been deployed on a trans-Pacific network by a coalition consisting of the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) Project, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Corsa Technology (Corsa), ESnet, AARNet and CSIRO.
The router located at AARNet/CSIRO in Australia exchanges routes with the Vandervecken software-defined networking (SDN) controller stack at ESnet in California and uses high performance data planes comprised of Corsa switches in both locations.
The deployed SDN-based peering router, developed by ONF and the ONOS Project, is a free, open source application built on ONOS and is currently available for download from the ONOS Project website. It enables SDN networks to seamlessly interact with software-defined and traditional (non-SDN) networks by peering with one another to advertise, collect and exchange routes using eBGP. The peering application receives route advertisements from peers, resolves next hops and then programs the OpenFlow™ switch in the SDN data plane through ONOS.
The ONOS-based peering router is deployed across two sites in Sydney, Australia. The Corsa switch is located in an AARNet data center in Haymarket and the ONOS application in a CSIRO research laboratory in Marsfield, approximately 15km away. It controls the high throughput Corsa OpenFlow DP6410 data plane and successfully peers across a trans-Pacific Layer 2 VLAN with a complementary SDN-based router, Vandervecken, at ESnet in Berkeley, Calif. (see figure 2).
The ESnet site also uses a Corsa DP6420 data plane, programmed by the Vandervecken SDN router software developed by Google and based on Routeflow project1 and Quagga on a Ryu controller.
“Having successfully exchanged 15,000 routes in this deployment reflecting true Internet scale and 100,000 routes in lab tests, it was programming the data plane with large forwarding tables that presented the real technical challenge here,” said Bill Snow, vice president of Engineering at ON.Lab.
“This operation has been up and running for over a month now, so it is no longer a question of whether SDN control planes can be deployed to support worldwide infrastructure. With ONOS’ support for high availability, scale and performance and with Corsa’s high performance, programmable data plane, the promise of SDN is turning into reality. An SDN control plane that readily interoperates with existing infrastructure, whether traditional or software-defined is the key to providing a migration path from legacy systems as well as a roadmap to pure SDN infrastructure.”
“As the Department of Energy’s high-bandwidth network for science, it’s exciting to be a partner in this project that is helping to transform networking,” said ESnet CTO Inder Monga. “Operational deployment of SDN-IP stacks will enable existing networks to seamlessly integrate with innovative SDN network deployments. Since we are funded by the U.S. government, it’s important this software is free and open source so that our investment in the project can be further leveraged by the rest of the networking community.”
