Abstract

This project implements a new SBI for ONOS and allows new deployment use-cases. The main goal is to support the L3 multi-tenants isolation in a cloud network and routing system in a simple, a stable and a scalable way.

Why are we doing this?

Problem statement

The BGP protocol is widely used in the networks and recently it has received a lot of attention in the context of Routing solution for Large-Scale Data Center [1]. However, it is not widely deployed in hosts/hypervisors. The IETF draft [1] discusses how the control plane for BGP IP VPNs [RFC4364] can be used and extended via the XMPP protocol to provide a solution for large-scale data centers that meets some key requirements, e.g., accommodating application bandwidth and latency. This solution provides an IP service to end-system virtual interfaces and improves network stability and scalability, as a result of confining L2 broadcast domains and isolating the different tenants at L3 level. The XMPP protocol (with Publish/Subscribe extension) is used in this solution to distribute routing information over the network. However, the ONOS controller does not support XMPP implementation as SBI, thus the usage of ONOS in the described framework is not possible so far. Moreover, as the XMPP protocol is highly extensible it may be used in various applications, so it may be used as general-purpose message bus in SDN/Cloud network.

Impact of this problem

The implementation of XMPP as SBI will allow the deployment of ONOS in new use cases and the consideration of the architecture described in [2] as the networking solution for the OpenStack-based clouds. It will provide L3VPN or EVPN network isolation between tenants. Moreover, the XMPP is easily extensible and may be used to design future network configuration strategies.

How do we judge success?

What are possible solutions?

XMPP-based BGP/MPLS IP VPN architecture with the mapping of  ONOS integration with a virtualization hypervisor that supports vRouter like OpenContrail vRouter solution for the administration of the Virtual machines (compute nodes) and the tenants isolation at L3 level.

What are we doing?

The XMPP protocol is XML-based data exchange protocol. The main feature of XMPP is extensibility and payload-agnosticism. The XMPP Core [RFC6120] describes the basics of XMPP, while the communication model is defined in XEP (XMPP Extension Protocol) specifications. We have designed the XMPP protocol implementation in the extensible manner, so the core XMPP implementation may be extended by the new XEPs seamlessly.  

The project will deliver the extensible implementation architecture of XMPP for ONOS. Moreover, the PoC of architecture [2] will be presented as the use case (Intra-DC L3VPN/EVPN) for XMPP implementation.

Why will a customer want this?

The project results will provide one more protocol to build SDN control plane by using XMPP protocol. It may drive a new innovations in the area of SDN by applying XMPP protocol to new use cases. The usage of XMPP allows to build the novel data center multi-tenancy technology as an alternative to classical OpenStack mechanism or ONOS SONA.

Visualize the solution

The XMPP implementation and simple demo using vRouter emulator has been developed already. The PoC presents XMPP-based BGP-signaled End System IP VPN using ONOS as a control plane.

Perspective

Integrate the work with the Gluon project