ONOS Multi-Clusters Peering Provider

Proposed name for the project

ONOS Multi-Clusters Peering Provider

Project type

feature/enhancement

Project Description

To summarize the objective of this feature project in a sentence, we can say that it enables multiple ONOS clusters to share information about their networks, using an East-West interface, based on a peer-to-peer approach. Moreover, it allows an application, running on top of a specific cluster, to configure, via the NB Core API, routes crossing different dataplane devices, not under the control of that cluster. 

To implement this solution we decided to implement a new ONOS Provider (e.g. Adapter), responsible to interact with the ONOS core to:

• retrieve the local cluster topology
• inject the remote clusters topologies
• configure (add/modify/remove) intents coming from remote clusters

Topology Abstraction

Each cluster exposes the local topology to the peers as a single big switch, with several ports. Each port can represent both a customer edge point (e.g. the boundary between the managed infrastructure and remote networks) or an interconnection with other managed clusters. 

The cross-connection matrix (not all the ports can be reached from a source port, in case of link failures) and related metric information (hop-counts and link bandwidth) are also shared with remote clusters. 

Policy-based Approach

In order to cover a wide numbers of different scenarios, we decided to exploit a policy-based approach, very similar to a standard multi-domain protocol such as BGP. The network operator can configure at runtime:

• the peering clusters allowed to access the local information
• the maximum number of intents settable by each remote cluster
• the weight of each interlink (the link between the local and remote cluster)
• the preferred path for specific classes of traffic (based on L2 and L3 fields)
• ...  

Applicability: single and multi-domain

This feature can be applied both to single and multi domain use-cases.

Detailed information could be found in the Design child page.

Project Design

See the Project Design page.

Project point of contact

Project contributors

Meeting Minutes

Project Schedule