The OpenDaylight Project , a community-led and industry-supported open source framework to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN), announce a set of accepted technical contribution networking protocols to virtualization to security.
OpenDaylight reviewed and accepted contributions from Cisco, ConteXtream, Ericsson, IBM, NEC, Pantheon, Plexxi, Radware and developers Brent Salisbury and Evan Zeller from the University of Kentucky.
The base architecture for the OpenDaylight controller is a combination of two code bases that were brought together through a collaborative proposal by Colin Dixon of IBM and David Erickson of Stanford. Shortly thereafter, NEC contributed a key feature with its Virtual Tenant Networking technology.
OpenDaylight highlighted the following recent contributions:
Affinity Metadata Service: Contributed by Plexxi, this service provides an API allowing the OpenDaylight controller and higher-level applications to create and share an abstract, topology and implementation independent description of the infrastructure needs, preferences and behaviors of workloads that use the network to "talk" to one another.
BGP/PCEP protocol library: The Cisco-contributed library provides Java-based implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP).
Defense4All: Radware contributed this toolset to be used for the detection and mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Defense4All subsystems include statistics collection, anomaly detection, traffic redirection and mitigation management that together allow applications to leverage the OpenDaylight controller and an SDN architecture to effectively manage DDoS attacks.
LISP Mapping Service: ConteXtream contributed its Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) Mapping Service and protocol plugin. The LISP protocol enables separation of endpoint identity (EID) from routing location (RLOC) by defining an overlay in the EID space that is mapped to the underlying network in the RLOC space. LISP is also a mapping service that provides the EID-to-RLOC mapping information including forwarding policy to LISP routers for tunneling and forwarding purposes. In the context of network virtualization, a mapping service can be queried by LISP-enabled network devices to provide mapping of the virtual network endpoints to the underlying physical network, including the associated forwarding policies.
Open DOVE: IBM contributed a version of its established network virtualization technology, called Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE), that provides isolated multi-tenant networks on any IP network in a virtualized data center allowing administrators to define virtual switches and networks, Quality of Service, security, bandwidth, priorities and more. DOVE provides each tenant with a virtual network abstraction providing Layer 2 or Layer 3 connectivity and the ability to control communication using access control policies. Address dissemination and policy enforcement in Open DOVE is provided by a clustered directory service. It also includes a gateway function to enable virtual machines on a virtual network to communicate with hosts outside the virtual network domain.
OpenFlow 1.3.0 Protocol Library: Pantheon’s contribution is an implementation of the OpenFlow protocol as defined in OpenFlow Switch Specification Version 1.3.0. The library is designed to be extensible from third-party bundles in order to support vendor extensions and should serve as a basis for the OpenFlow 1.3.0 southbound plugin for the OpenDaylight controller.
OpenFlow Plugin: Cisco, Ericsson and IBM combined efforts to create a common, uniform OpenDaylight plugin to support all implementations of the OpenFlow specification as it develops and evolves. It provides support for the existing OpenFlow 1.0 implementation, while aiming to support OpenFlow 1.3.x and further versions of the specification. It will be implemented in a way that existing and future OpenFlow protocol specifications can be integrated and published for the OpenDaylight controller.
Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol (OVSDB) is a project led by Brent Salisbury and Evan Zeller from the University of Kentucky. Open vSwitch is an open source software project implementing virtual switching that is interoperable with many major hypervisors and used extensively in cloud computing environments. The OVSDB integration project will allow OpenDaylight to view, modify and delete Open vSwitch objects such as bridges and ports by way of the Open vSwitch database.
YANG Tools: This is an infrastructure project initiated by Cisco aimed at developing necessary tooling and libraries providing ubiquitous support for YANG as a data modeling language within OpenDaylight.
"Community growth for OpenDaylight has been astonishing with hundreds of developers now contributing their time and talents for the advancement of SDN. Everything is starting to congeal between the contributions and the people working fast and furious to build what we expect will be industry leading SDN technology," said David Meyer, Technical Steering Committee chair, OpenDaylight Project. “The steady growth of the corporate member base is ensuring that we have a solid financial foundation from which to operate. It's an exciting time to be involved with SDN."
OpenDaylight also noted that its membership roster has grown to 27 companies since launch.
