Successfully exchanges 15,000 routes on US-Australia connection using software router.

May 6, 2015

3 Min Read

MENLO PARK, Calif. — A coalition comprising the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) Project, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Corsa Technology, ESnet, AARNet and CSIRO today announced the successful deployment of an ONOS-based software-defined peering router. The router located at AARNet/CSIRO in Australia exchanges routes with the Vandervecken software-defined networking (SDN) controller stack at ESnet in California and uses high performance data planes comprised of Corsa switches in both locations.

This deployment validates the benefits of open source SDN principles to flexibly deliver agile applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary networking solutions. Successfully deploying carrier-grade SDN applications with control and data planes capable of running at Internet-scale capacity in the WAN using disparate SDN systems represents an important milestone for the networking industry.

The deployed SDN-based peering router, developed by ONF and the ONOS Project, is a free, open source application built on ONOS and is currently available for download from the ONOS Project website. It enables SDN networks to seamlessly interact with software-defined and traditional (non-SDN) networks by peering with one another to advertise, collect and exchange routes using eBGP. The peering application receives route advertisements from peers, resolves next hops and then programs the OpenFlow switch in the SDN data plane through ONOS.

The ONOS-based peering router is deployed across two sites in Sydney, Australia. The Corsa switch is located in an AARNet data center in Haymarket and the ONOS application in a CSIRO research laboratory in Marsfield, approximately 15km away. It controls the high throughput Corsa OpenFlow DP6410 data plane and successfully peers across a trans-Pacific Layer 2 VLAN with a complementary SDN-based router, Vandervecken, at ESnet in Berkeley, Calif. (see figure 2). The ESnet site also uses a Corsa DP6420 data plane, programmed by the Vandervecken SDN router software developed by Google and based on Routeflow project1 and Quagga on a Ryu controller.

Peering Router Deployment

The production ESnet (AS293) router advertises 15,000 routes comprising research and education networks to the Vandervecken Router, which in turn advertises these to the peering router in Sydney, Australia. In addition to successfully peering with the Vandervecken router, the ONOS-based router also peers with a traditional router in a private AS within AARNet/CSIRO.

ONOS provided the high performance, scalable SDN control plane for the peering router at AARNet. It also programmed the multi-table pipeline in the Corsa DP6420 data plane using OpenFlow v1.3.

“Having successfully exchanged 15,000 routes in this deployment reflecting true Internet scale and 100,000 routes in lab tests, it was programming the data plane with large forwarding tables that presented the real technical challenge here,” said Bill Snow, vice president of Engineering at ON.Lab. “This operation has been up and running for over a month now, so it is no longer a question of whether SDN control planes can be deployed to support worldwide infrastructure. With ONOS’ support for high availability, scale and performance and with Corsa’s high performance, programmable data plane, the promise of SDN is turning into reality. An SDN control plane that readily interoperates with existing infrastructure, whether traditional or software-defined is the key to providing a migration path from legacy systems as well as a roadmap to pure SDN infrastructure.”

ON.Lab

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