Introduction

This document provides information on how to install, configure and run SDN-IP in an SDN network.

It's recommended that you read the architecture guide <LINK> to become familiar with the concepts before trying to set up the application.

Network model

SDN-IP allows an SDN network to peer and exchange traffic with adjacent external network using the BGP routing protocol. 

FIGURE 1 shows the topology elements we expect in our network model.

The most fundamental building block is, of course, the SDN network. This is the network that is controlled by ONOS, and will use SDN-IP to communicate with the outside world.

Border routers of external networks are connected at the edge of the SDN network. The border routers need not be physically connected to an SDN switch, however we assume that we are directly connected at the IP level to the peering address of each border router. That is, for each router we have a peering address in the same subnet as the router's peering address. We don't currently support multi-hop BGP peering sessions.

The third part of the model is the internal BGP control plane. Inside the SDN network there are one or more internal BGP speakers. There are no specific requirements on the implementation of the BGP speakers - as long as they support both external BPG (eBGP) and internal BGP (iBGP) peering sessions they will work. Each BGP speaker must have at least one connection to the SDN data plane network. The BGP speaker will peer with external BGP routers over this connection. 

Each BGP speaker also needs to peer with each SDN-IP instance so it can relay routes to the SDN-IP instances. These peering session are iBGP sessions, so there needs to be a full mesh between all BGP speakers and SDN-IP instances. The only exception is that SDN-IP instances do not need to peer with each other, and it is not even possible to configure this. SDN-IP never advertises router over the iBGP sessions, it only listens to routers. The connectivity for this peering must be out-of-band of the data plane. 

Finally, ONOS must be deployed either as a single instance or as a cluster.

Big Router abstraction

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Configuration

SDN-IP currently uses a simple JSON file format to import configuration data. There are two separate files: addresses.json for IP and MAC address data, and sdnip.json for BGP peering session data.

addresses.json

The addresses.json file is used to configure the addresses that ONOS uses to talk with the outside world.

{
    "addresses" : [
        {
            "dpid" : "00:00:00:00:00:00:00:a1",
            "port" : "1",
            "ips" : ["10.0.1.101/24"],
            "mac" : "00:00:00:00:00:01"
        },
        {
            "dpid" : "00:00:00:00:00:00:00:a2",
            "port" : "1",
            "ips" : ["10.0.2.101/24"],
            "mac" : "00:00:00:00:00:01"
        },
        {
            "dpid" : "00:00:00:00:00:00:00:a5",
            "port" : "1",
            "ips" : ["10.0.3.101/24"],
            "mac" : "00:00:00:00:00:01"
        },
        {
            "dpid" : "00:00:00:00:00:00:00:a6",
            "port" : "1",
            "ips" : ["10.0.4.101/24"],
            "mac" : "00:00:00:00:00:01"
        }
    ]
}