SDX - The Software Defined Exchange

© 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology

SDX - The Software Defined Exchange

Russ Clark and Muhammad ShahbazCollege of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology

With Many Others: Nick Feamster, Ron Hutchins,

Arpit Gupta, Hyojoon Kim,Laurent Vanbever, Jen Rexford – Princeton

Scott Shenker – UC Berkeley

© 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 2

General Goals For SDN

• More Control Of Our Network!

• Active Control Plane – not just during maintenance!

• Policy Management

• better than VLANs, Subnets, Firewalls, IDS, IPS, etc

• Active Projects in:

• Network access control

• Wide-area video distribution

• Capacity Monitoring and Management

• Simplified Configuration - “virtual patch panel”

• Security, Data Privacy

• Better Student Projects!!!

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The Internet Exchange

• Peering is critical to the Internet

• Impossible to manage the entire Internet as a single entity

• Must be broken up into Autonomous Systems

• Managed by different entities with different business needs

• Implementation of peering requires both:

• Business relationships

• Technical solutions – e.g. BGP

• The Internet Exchange Point or IXP

• A single, large peering site where multiple providers come together

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Limitations of BGP

• Limited Policy Expression

• Routing based only on Destination IP

• Single-hop influence radius

• Operators want more:

• Application specific

• Multi-hop influence

• Support for more complex business relationships

© 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 5

SDN in the IXP

• Initial focus is on SDN within the IXP

• This is a practical starting point

• We think there are interesting things to be done

• Leverage SDN to support richer policy expression

• Make packet forwarding decisions based on more than just the destination IP address

• The SDX – A Software Defined IXP

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SDX Architecture

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What SDX Could Use from OpenFlow

• Re-entrant Packet Processing

• With multiple policies to apply, it would be useful to allow some packets to be “re-evaluated” by the switch after initial application of rules

• Cross-domain Control

• A notion of “Barrier” across: multiple switches and multiple administrative domains

• Without this, we’ve only just begun to explore how to do SDN between exchanges

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SDX Progress

• Built an SDX controller for IXPs

• Deployment at ColoATL

• Next steps: (1) Peering with Internet2, ES.Net and others, (2) Extension to multiple sites.

• Selected for the Internet2 Innovation Award 2013

• Press Release: http://www.internet2.edu/network/innovative-application-awards.html

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/sdn-ixp/internet2award

© 2013 Georgia Institute of Technology 9

Acknowledgments

• This work made possible by: