OPENFLOW PROTOCOL

(BASED ON ONF SPECIFICATION 1.3.1)

Kaliyaperumal K
(Kaliyaperumal.krishnan@gmail.com)
AGENDA

 Introduction to SDN
 Introduction to OFP

 OF Switch components

 OF Ports

 OF Tables

 OF Channel
SDN INTRODUCTION

In the SDN architecture, the control and data

planes are decoupled, network intelligence
and state are logically centralized, and the
underlying network infrastructure is
abstracted from the applications.
- ONF white paper
LIMITATION OF CURRENT NETWORKING…

 Complexity of current static network

 Server virtualization
 IP converged network for video, data and audio
 Inconsistent policies
 Inability to scale
OPENFLOW PROTOCOL

Types of the switches:

 Open-flow only
 Open-flow hybrid

Major components:
 Controller
 Openflow channel
 Group Table
 Meter Table
 Flow Table
PORTS
 Open flow ports:
 Network interfaces for passing packets between Openflow Processing
and the rest of the Network
 Openflow switches connected through Openflow ports

Types:
 Physical ports
 Switch defined ports

 Eg. Physical ports map one to one Ethernet interfaces

 Logical Ports
 switch defined ports that don’t correspond to a hardware interface of
switch
 Logical ports include “Tunnel-ID”.

 Reserved Ports
 defined by ONF 1.3.1

 specify generic forwarding actions such as sending to the controller,

flooding and forwarding using non-openflow methods
RESERVED PORT TYPES
 ALL
 represents all ports the switch can use for forwarding a specific port
 can be used only as output interface
 CONTROLLER
 represents the control channel with the open flow controller
 can be used as ingress (packet-out) and egress (packet-in)
 TABLE
 represents the start of the openflow pipeline
 used for control packets generated by the switch
 IN-PORT
 represents packet ingress port
 ANY
 special values used in openflow command when no port is specified
 can neither be used as ingress nor egress
 LOCAL
 used for switch local networking and its management stack
 NORMAL
 represents the traditional non-openflow pipeline of the switch
 FLOOD
 flooding using normal pipeline of the switch on all the ports except the incoming port
and the port which is in blocked state
TABLES
 Openflow Tables
 Allows to have multiple flow tables and each would have n
number of flow entries
 Group Table Only one Group table
 Group multiple flow entries to point to a group
 Meter Table
 Only one Meter table
 Used for shaping the traffic
OPENFLOW TABLES
 Pipeline processing
 Start at the first FT and may be redirected to another FT, actions would
be updated by each matching FE
 Go only in forward direction not backward
 If packet is not redirected to another FT then pipeline processing stops
and the packet is processed with associated actions set.
 Flow Table
 Match field, Priority, Counters, Instructions and Timeouts
 Matching
 Packet type, packet headers, src MAC, dest IP
 Matching with multiple entries – choose based on priority
 Apply-actions
 Table-miss
 Table-miss FE added by the controller
 Priority is 0
 Can be dropped, fwd to next FT, fwd to controller
 Flow removal
 Requested by the controller
 Timer expiry ( hard timeout timer, idle time out timer)
PIPELINE PROCESSING
PACKET FLOW THROUGH OF SWITCH
GROUP TABLE
 Additional method for forwarding to a group of entries
 Main components:
 Group ID, Group Type, Counters, Action buckets ( each action bucket
contains a set of actions to be executed)
 Group Type:
 All
 Execute all buckets in a group
 Used mainly for multicast and broadcast – fwd a pkt on all the ports
 Select
 Execute one bucket in a Group ( Eg. ECMP packets)
 Implemented for load sharing and redundancy
 Indirect
 Execute one defined bucket in this Group
 Supports only a single bucket ( Eg. 40K routes are pointing to same next hop)
 Fast failover
 Execute the first live bucket
 Eg. There is a primary path and secondary path – pass the traffic on primary
path and if it fails use the secondary one.
METER TABLE
 Consists of meter entries and defining per-flow meters
 Per-flow meters enable OF to implement QoS operations
(rate-limiting)
 Components of Meter table:
 Meter ID, Meter Band, Counters
 Meters measures the rate of packets assigned to it and
enable controlling the rate of those packets
 Meters are attached directly to flow entries
 Meter band: unordered list of meter bands, where each
meter band specifies the rate of the band and the way to
process packet
 Components of Meter band:
 Band Type, Rate, Counters, Type specific arguments
 Band Type : defined how to process a packet (drop/ dscp remark)
OPENFLOW TABLE INSTRUCTIONS
 Instructions are executed when a packet matches entry
 Instruction result:
 Change the packet
 Action set
 Pipeline processing
 Supported instruction Types:
 Meter ID
 Direct a packet to the meter id. It may be drooped because of metering.
 Apply-Actions
 Apply a specific action immediately here packets are modified between 2 flow
tables
 Clear-Actions
 clear all the actions in the action set immediately
 Write-Actions
 add a new action into the existing action set. if same action exists then
overwrite it.
 Write-Metadata
 write the masked meta data value
 Goto-Table
 Indicate the next table in the processing pipeline
ACTION SET
 Action set is associated with each packet
 FE modify the action set using write-action/ clear-action
 Actions in the action-set will be executed when pipeline is
stopped
 Action set contains maximum of one action of each type
 If multiple actions of the same type need to be added then use
“Apply-Actions”
 Need to follow the below order to execute action
 Different Types of Action Set:
 Copy TTL inwards – apply copy inward actions to the packet
 Pop – apply all tag pop actions to the packet
 Push MPLS – apply MPLS tag push action to the packet
 Push PBB – apply PBB tag push action to the packet
 Copy TTL outwards
 Decrement TTL
 Set – apply set field actions to the packet
 QoS
 Group – apply group actions
 Output – forward a packet on the port specified by the output action
ACTION LIST

 “Apply-action” , “packet-out” messages include action list

 Execute an action immediately
 Actions are executed sequentially in the order they have
been specified
 If action list contains an output action, a copy of the packet
is forwarded in its current state to the desired port
 Action-set shouldn’t be changed because of action-list
ACTION
 What to do with the packet when match criteria matches
with the packet
 Some of the Action Type:
 Output
 Fwd a pkt to the specified open flow port (physical/ logical/reserved)
 Set Queue
 Set Queue-id of the port : determines which queue should be used for
scheduling and forwarding packet
 Drop
 Packets which doesn’t have output action should be dropped
 Group
 Process the packet through specified group
 Push-Tag/ Pop-Tag
 Insert VLAN, MPLS, PBB tage
 Set-Field
 Rewriting a field in the packet header
 Change TTL
 Decrement TTL
OPENFLOW CHANNEL
 Message:
 Controller-to-switch message
 Asynchronous message
 Symmetric message
 Controller to Switch Message:
 Feature request/reply
 Controller request the switch about its capability
 Configuration request/reply
 Query the switch configuration
 Modify-State
 Add/delete/modify entries in the flow table
 Read-State
 Collect various info from the switch such as config, statistics
 Packet-Out
 Controller informs switch to fwd a packet on a specific interface
 Reply to “packet-in”
 Barrier
 Controller uses this to make sure message dependencies are met
 Role-Request
 To set the role of its openflow channel/ query that role
 Asynchronous configuration
 Set a filter an asynchronous message it receives from switch
ASYNCHRONOUS MESSAGE
 Sent by switch to the controller to denote packet arrival,
switch state change or error
 Types:
 Packet-in
 Packet needs to be processed by the controller will be sent as packet-in
 Eg. Table miss, TTL checking

 Switch can store the packet in the buffer and send only the buffer-ID along

with the header ( default 128 bytes – it is configurable)

 Buffer would expire after a period of interval

 Flow Removal
 Once flow entry is deleted by a Switch when any one of the timer expiry,
switch would inform the controller
 Port Status
 When port admin state/ protocol state is changed to down
 Error
 Switch would send an error message if it not able to process a message
which was sent by a controller
SYMMETRIC MESSAGE

 Hello
 Exchange information between switch and controller when
switch comes up
 Controller learns about switch from Hello packet
 Echo
 Echo request/reply messages can be sent from either the
switch or the controller, and must return an echo reply.
 They are mainly used to verify the liveness of a controller-
switch connection
 Experimenter
 Used for future/testing purpose
OPENFLOW CHANNEL CONNECTION

 Connection setup
 TLS/ TCP connection
 Version should match

 Connection interruption
 Failure secure mode
 Drop all the message destined to the controller
 Flow entries would automatically expire

 Failure standalone mode

 Will act as a legacy switch
 Encryption
 Controller and switch authenticate each other
OPENFLOW CHANNEL CONNECTION
 Multiple controller
 For load-balancing and redundancy
 Role:
 EQUAL:
 All controllers have read and write permission on the switch

 MASTER-SLAVE:
 only one Master and all are slave

 Master have read and write access but all slaves can only read

 When master goes down, election would happen and any of them cane
be selected as a Master
 Once master is selected, the switch has to send error message to the
other/ old Master
 Generation id – identifies a given mastership view
OPENFLOW CHANNEL CONNECTION
 Auxiliary connection
 Created by switch for better performance and parallelism
 Openflow channel can composed of a main connection and multiple
auxiliary connections
 Connection from switch to the controller are identified by

 Data path id + Auxiliary ID

 Data path id would be same for all

 Auxiliary id is 0 for main connection and non-zero for others

 Auxiliary connections could be created only if main connection is

established
 Each Aux connection uses their different transport (TCP, TSL ports) but
source IP and destination IP should be same
 There is no difference between main connection and aux connections

 If Main connection goes down, all aux connection should be brought

down
 Message reordering is not supported – can use Barrier message
THANK YOU