The interface configuration allows users to configure information about ports and logical ports of devices connected to the system. The information is used by ONOS and its applications to decide how to select and forward the network traffic. The interface configuration is probably the most similar to the "legacy" network devices configuration. Examples of common patterns are "select traffic tagged with VLAN X on port Y", "Select all the traffic coming with IP A and send it out through port B".

The configuration contains a list of physical ports, and logical interfaces. A more detailed explanation is reported below.

Basic definitions

• Ports represent physical ports of devices connected to ONOS. They act as containers of one or more interfaces that actually hold the real configuration
• Interfaces are logical entities, subset of physical ports, distinguished by different parameters, such as i.e. VLANs, IPs, MAC addresses

Configuration structure

Following is reported a typical interface configuration used for SDN-IP

{
    "ports" : {
        "of:0000000000000001/1" : {
            "interfaces" : [
                {
                    "name" : "Interface 1 sw 1",
				    "ips"  : [ "1.1.1.1/24", "10.10.10.1/24" ],
                    "mac"  : "00:00:00:00:00:01"
                }
            ]
        },
        "of:0000000000000002/1" : {
            "interfaces" : [
                {
                    "name" : "Interface 1 sw 2",
                    "ips"  : [ "2.2.2.2/24" ],
					"vlan" : "100",
				    "mac"  : "00:00:00:00:00:02"
                },
				{
                    "name" : "Interface 2 sw 2",
                    "ips"  : [ "3.3.3.3/24" ],
					"vlan": "150",
				    "mac"  : "00:00:00:00:00:03"
                }
            ]
        }
}

Configuration semantic and best-practices:

What's reported above is a sample configuration, used for in SDN-IP. The configuration is very specific to the application that parses it.

While the configuration syntax and the general structure is globally enforced by the interface configuration subsystem itself, It's up to each ONOS application how to interpret the values provided. For example, some applications might request just one parameter per interface (it might be the case of some L2 applications with VLAN); some others might reques more (for example IPs for L3 applications).

Even if different applications might interpret the configuration in different ways, there's an agreement about how parameters should be read. Following is a list of rules we generally follow:

• name:

1 to 1 mapping between an interface and a port

Configurations attributes written directly under a physical port won't be parsed. In case you like to apply a specific configuration to an entire physical port, just add one interface to it and specify inside its parameters.