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Control Plane

The document outlines the functions of the control plane in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), including shortest path forwarding, notification management, security mechanisms, and topology management. It describes the role of the Network Operating System (NOS) in managing network infrastructure and the various interfaces (southbound and northbound) that facilitate communication between the control and data planes. Additionally, it highlights the importance of standardizing northbound APIs to simplify the development of SDN applications.

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Ganesh Kumar
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20 views9 pages

Control Plane

The document outlines the functions of the control plane in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), including shortest path forwarding, notification management, security mechanisms, and topology management. It describes the role of the Network Operating System (NOS) in managing network infrastructure and the various interfaces (southbound and northbound) that facilitate communication between the control and data planes. Additionally, it highlights the importance of standardizing northbound APIs to simplify the development of SDN applications.

Uploaded by

Ganesh Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Functions of Control Plane

 Shortest path forwarding: Uses routing information collected from


switches to establish preferred routes.
 Notification manager: Receives, processes, and forwards to an
application events, such as alarm notifications, security alarms, and state
changes.
 Security mechanisms: Provides isolation and security enforcement
between applications and services.
 Topology manager: Builds and maintains switch interconnection topology
information.
 Statistics manager: Collects data on traffic through the switches.
 Device manager: Configures switch parameters and attributes and
manages flow tables.
 The functionality provided by the SDN controller can be viewed as a
network operating system (NOS).
 NOS provides essential services, common application programming
interfaces (APIs), and an abstraction of lower-layer elements to developers.
 NOS is the software that manages and controls the network infrastructure.
 It enables the developers to define network policies and manage networks
without concern for the details of the network device characteristics.
 Southbound Interface
 It provides the logical connection between the SDN controller and the data
plane switches.
 Some controller products and configurations support only a single
southbound protocol.
A more flexible approach is the use of a southbound abstraction layer that
provides a common interface for the control plane functions while supporting
multiple southbound APIs
 The most commonly implemented southbound API is OpenFlow
Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol (OVSDB):
 Open vSwitch (OVS) an open source software project which implements
virtual switching that is interoperable with almost all popular hypervisors.
 VS uses OpenFlow for message forwarding in the control plane for both
virtual and physical ports. OVSDB is the protocol used to manage and
configure OVS instances
Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES):
 An IETF effort that standardizes the interface between the control plane
and the data plane for IP routers.
Protocol Oblivious Forwarding (POF):
 This is advertised as an enhancement to OpenFlow that simplifies the logic
in the data plane to a very generic forwarding element that need not
understand the protocol data unit (PDU) format in terms of fields at various
protocol levels.
 Rather, matching is done by means of (offset, length) blocks within a
packet. Intelligence about packet format resides at the control plane level.
Northbound Interface
 The northbound interface enables applications to access control plane
functions and services without needing to know the details of the
underlying network switches.
 The northbound interface is more typically viewed as a software API
rather than a protocol.
 Unlike the southbound and eastbound/westbound interfaces, where a
number of heterogeneous interfaces have been defined, there is no widely
accepted standard for the northbound interface
 The result has been that a number of unique APIs have been developed for
various controllers, complicating the effort to develop SDN applications.
 To address this issue the Open Networking Foundation formed the
Northbound Interface Working Group (NBI-WG) in 2013,
 With the objective of defining and standardizing a number of broadly
useful northbound APIs.

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