Assignment 1 Answer Sheet

Please use this sheet to write and upload your answers:

I. T/F: 34%
Write your answer as T for True and F for False in the indicated numbers:

1.T 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33. 34.

II. Multiple Choice: 14%

1. 2. 3. 4.
5. 6. 7.

I. Short answers problems: 44%

1. (10 points) Mention and describe only five of the principle requirements (ODCA
requirements) for the modern networking approach.

2. (10 points) There are many key characteristics of SDN, Describe five of them?
 The control plane is separated from the data plane; data plane devices become simple packet-
forwarding devices.
 The control plane is implemented in a centralized controller or set of coordinated centralized
controllers.
 The SDN controller has a centralized view of the network or networks under its
control
 The controller is portable software that can run on commodity servers and is capable
of programming the forwarding devices based on a centralized view of the network.
 Open interfaces are defined between the devices in the control plane (controllers) and those in
the data plane
 The network is programmable by applications running on top of the SDN controllers; the SDN
controllers present an abstract view of network resources to the applications

3. (4 points) What types of flows are in the data plane?

 Data packet flow
 Control flow
Data packet flows consist of streams of IP packets. It may be necessary for the forwarding table
to define entries based on fields in upper-level protocol headers, such as TCP, UDP, or some
other transport or application protocol. The network device examines the IP header and possibly
other headers in each packet and makes a forwarding decision.
 The other important flow of traffic is via the southbound application programming interface
(API), consisting of OpenFlow protocol data units (PDUs) or some similar southbound API
protocol traffic.

The principal functions of the network device are the following:

■ Control support function: Interacts with the SDN control layer to support programmability via
resource-control interfaces. The switch communicates with the controller and the controller
manages the switch via the OpenFlow switch protocol.
■ Data forwarding function: Accepts incoming data flows from other network devices and end
systems and forwards them along the data forwarding paths that have been computed and
established according to the rules defined by the SDN applications.

4. (6 points) What type of ports does the OpenFlow define?

OpenFlow defines three types of ports:

■ Physical port: Corresponds to a hardware interface of the switch. For example, on an Ethernet
switch, physical ports map one to one to the Ethernet interfaces.

■ Logical port: Does not correspond directly to a hardware interface of the switch. Logical ports are
higher-level abstractions that may be defined in the switch using non-OpenFlow methods (for
example, link aggregation groups, tunnels, and loopback interfaces). Logical ports may include
packet encapsulation and may map to various physical ports. The processing done by the logical port
is implementation dependent and must be transparent to OpenFlow processing, and those ports
must interact with OpenFlow processing like OpenFlow physical ports.

■ Reserved port: Defined by the OpenFlow specification. It specifies generic forwarding actions such
as sending to and receiving from the controller, flooding, or forwarding using non-OpenFlow
methods, such as “normal” switch processing.

5. (6 points) Open Flow defined three types of tables in the logical switch; describe each
type?

The OpenFlow specification defines three types of tables in the logical switch architecture.

A flow table matches incoming packets to a particular flow and specifies what functions are to be
performed on the packets. There may be multiple flow tables that operate in a pipeline fashion.

A flow table may direct a flow to a group table, which may trigger a variety of actions that affect one
or more flows.

A meter table can trigger a variety of performance-related actions on a flow.Using the OpenFlow
switch protocol, the controller can add, update, and delete flow entries in tables, both reactively (in
response to packets) and proactively.
 6. (8 points) What are the four group entries components and their roles in a group table?

The group table and group actions enable OpenFlow to represent a set of ports as a single entity for
forwarding packets. Different types of groups are provided to represent different forwarding
abstractions, such as multicasting and broadcasting.

Each group table consists of a number of rows, called group entries, consisting of four components

■ Group identifier: A 32-bit unsigned integer uniquely identifying the group. A group is defined as
an entry in the group table.

■ Group type: To determine group semantics, as explained subsequently.

■ Counters: Updated when packets are processed by a group.

■ Action buckets: An ordered list of action buckets, where each action bucket contains a set of
actions to execute and associated parameters.

II. Match the following group types with correct answer: 8%.

--- All a. execute one bucket in the group base on a switch-computed selection algorithm like
Round Rabin. Selection can be implemented equally or based on weighted factors.

--- Select b. this allow multiple packet follow to point to a common group identifier using GID for
all, then all input will be sent to one output. Therefore, this acts as an aggregate
function for packet flow.
--- Fast Failover
c. Execute all the buckets in the group, thus each arriving packet is cloned so that the
incoming packet is then transmitted on multiple output ports.
--- Indirect
d. Execute the first live bucket, port liveness is managed by code outside the scope of
OpenFlow, like congestion control mechanism.