The 3rd ALIEN project meeting took place on 3-5 February at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.
The meeting was primarily devoted to WP1, WP6 and WP5, with some additional discussion on FIA Athens 2014 ALIEN presence and the ALIEN Workshop at EWSDN 2014. The project amendment has been discussed and agreed among all partners. Last day was dedicated to the software development meeting, with a focus on WP3 and AMsoil.
The Experiments on OFELIA activity is responsible for running the experiments over the OFELIA FIRE experimental facility, in order to test and demonstrate ALIEN HAL concept.
This activity aims towards five specific goals:
First of all, this activity is responsible for the integration and validation of all ALIEN developments:
The experiments performed by this activity combines CCN with OpenFlow using the existing work from the COntent NETwork (CONET) project. The ALIEN project is actively contributing to the CONET development in cooperation with the team that is currently supporting the code. Due to the fact that the ALIEN project deals with OpenFlow, the ALIEN consortium focuses mainly on the OpenFlow related part of the CONET development (i.e. the FloodLight controller modules). Currently, some areas CONET for enhancement have been identified (see Fig.1) and agreed between ALIEN and CONET teams:
Figure 1 – ALIEN improvements to the current CONET development
The CCN experiments based on CONET solution are performed within an ALIEN slice created in OFELIA testbed (see Fig.2). The ALIEN slice includes both computational resources (e.g. end-nodes, CONET nodes and OpenFlow controller), ALIEN hardware platforms and OpenFlow devices from the pool of resources provided by OFELIA.
Figure 2 – ALIEN slice topology within OFELIA FIRE testbed
Currently, ALIEN defined four use-cases which will be used to test whether the implementation of OpenFlow has been successful on the ALIEN hardware and the utility of OpenFlow in networking scenarios:
Figure 3 – Alternative routes scenario for ALIEN experimentation
The ALIEN project extends the OpenFlow Control Framework developed within the OFELIA project. It will allow to support abstraction of network information of equipment that are alien to the OpenFlow technology such as optical network elements, legacy Layer2 switches, network processors and programmable hardware platforms.
This activity focuses on:
The focus of this activity is to integrate the ALIEN resources inside the OFELIA Control Framework (OCF), in order to allow an experimenter to seamlessly access to both “standard” OFv1.0 devices and ALIEN Hardware, and of course to share these resources among all OFELIA users. For this reason, the OCF has to be extended to support the new features deployed within ALIEN project, in particular the ability of the ALIEN hardware to go beyond the OpenFlow v1.0.
In order to overcome the current limitations of OCF, it has been envisioned to implement a “time-based” sharing mechanism in order to share ALIEN hardware among experimenters within an OFELIA island. This solution can be integrated inside the OCF and can coexist with the standard OpenFlow Aggregate Manager as an extension, not as its replacement (thus being backward compatible with the current OCF running on existing OFELIA islands, letting each and every island administrator to decide if they want to enable or not this specific extension into their testbed).
The Time-Based sharing is an alternative to FlowVisor, which avoids inspection of the OpenFlow protocol. This characteristic makes the approach more general and future proof. Opposite to the FlowVisor solution, the Time-Based approach redirects the whole control (i.e. the OpenFlow control interface) to the adequate Controller and adapts the data plane to be consistent with the legacy infrastructure in OFELIA.
The new extension to OCF will allow on:
In the following the detailed description of the software modules that are being implemented (or extended) in order to realize the TBAM is presented:
This Resource Manager is in charge of:
