OpenFlow Experimentation in ORBIT

SB9 is dedicated to ​OpenFlow experimentation (NOTE: Nodes in SB9 don't have wireless interfaces!).

Hardware

As show in Figure 1, the SB9 is built around an Pronto OF capable switch with total of 9 nodes 7 of which are equipped with NetFPGA cards and 2 nodes are general purpose ORBIT nodes.
Figure 1: Ivan's arch drawing goes here

The switch labeled 'sw-sb-09', a Pronto 3240, provides the central connectivity backplane between all hosts/NetFPGAs in the sandbox. Each host (node1-1..node1-9) is connected to the sw-sb-09 switch through one 1GbE data connection on the interface 'eth0' or 'exp0'. As is the case with the rest of ORBIT nodes, a second GbE interface ('eth1' or 'control') of each node, that is used exclusively for experiment control (incl. ssh/telnet sessions), is connected to an external control switch outside of sandbox.

The first 7 hosts (node1-1..node1-7) each contain a 4x1GbE NetFPGA installed on a PCI slot. The NetFPGA has 4 connections to the top switch, each corresponding to its 4-GbE ports nf2c0-nf2c3.

Some external reference links about above hardware:

• ​OpenFlow
• ​Pronto 3240 | ​OpenFlow's page on Pronto 3240
• ​NetFPGA

Software

The Pronto switch is a OpenFlow enabled switch and can be run in native or OpenFlow mode by controlling its boot configuration. When in native mode, it runs the Pica8 Xorplus switch software while when it is in OpenFlow mode it can run either stock Indigo firmware or experimenter provided OpenFlow image for Pronto switches. The mode of operation is controlled by a simple HTTP based service.

Tutorials

• Tutorial 1: OpenFlow "Hello World"
• Tutorial 2: Multiple Controllers