OpenFlowMPLS

From OpenFlow Wiki

This page describes a project at Ericsson Research using OpenFlow and is NOT related to the official OpenFlow project!

Project Overview

Ericsson Research is working to support MPLS with OpenFlow. The goal is to turn an OpenFlow enabled switch, that has the necessary capabilities, into an MPLS switch. The basics of MPLS involves pushing, popping, and swapping one or more labels that reside in a "label stack" between the link layer and network layer header of a packet (see figure below). The current OpenFlow specification (0.8.9) does not provide the features needed to describe this functionality. As part of this project, we define a set of additions to the OpenFlow specification that allow us to perform all of the basic MPLS functionality. We also modified both the software and the NetFPGA OpenFlow switch reference implementations provided by Stanford to support these changes. Additionally we modified the simple OpenFlow controller (included with the reference implementation) to configure MPLS-enabled OpenFlow switches.

MPLS label stack in Ethernet/IP packet

Approach and resulting changes to OpenFlow

• Approach taken to support MPLS in OpenFlow
• Changes to OpenFlow Specification

Documentation

Software Switch Implementation

The following describes the software implementation of the MPLS-enabled OpenFlow switch based on Stanford's OpenFlow reference switch. We produced both a user-space and a kernel-space implementation of the software switch.

• MPLS-enabled Software OpenFlow Switch Implementation

NetFPGA Switch Implementation

The following describes the implementation of the NetFPGA MPLS-enabled OpenFlow switch based on Stanford's reference NetFPGA OpenFlow switch design.

• MPLS-enabled NetFPGA OpenFlow Switch Implementation

OpenFlow MPLS Control Plane

Simple MPLS-controller to configure an MLPS-enabled OpenFlow switch.

• OpenFlow-MPLS Control Plane

Download

• Alpha release of software switches and mpls-controller openflow-mpls.tgz
• NetFPGA implementation... coming soon

Bugs

We will be using Trac... coming soon

People

• Howard Green
• Mart Haitjema
• Peyman Kazemian
• James Kempf