Due to a ransomware attack, the wiki was reverted to a July 2022 version. . We apologize for the lack of a more recent valid backup.
OpenFlow is the primary southbound protocol for ONOS, and it is used to implement the SDN control plane. OpenFlow operates at RTT-level time scales, usually milliseconds.
OpenFlow has some limited configuration capabilities, but many configuration operations (such as telling a switch which controllers to connect to, enabling the OpenFlow agent on a switch, or enabling OpenFlow on specific ports) are explicitly out of scope for OpenFlow.
Switches that require configuration beyond what OpenFlow provides may need to use other southbound protocols such as ovsdb, NetConf, SNMP, etc.. ONOS currently provides drivers for several southbound configuration protocols. In the future, ONOS may provide configuration abstractions which enable devices to be configured in a generic manner, without having to worry about specific configuration protocols or semantics.