Design of All Programable Innovation Platform for Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) breaks the barrier of Internet innovation and has attracted tremendous attentions from both industrial and academic communities. Although OpenFlow is the de factor SDN protocol nowadays, which defines the interface between the data plane switches and the control plane controllers, there are emerging SDN proposals. Even for OpenFlow itself, it keeps evolving. As a result, a flexible SDN data plane switch, which is capable to upgrade the processing logic, is highly desired for the research and innovation purpose. In general, there are three ways to realize SDN/OpenFlow switches in the community. The first way uses software OpenFlow Switches (OFS), e.g., Open vSwitch [2]. Software OFS is easy to deploy and modify, but it is hard to guarantee the performance for wire-speed processing. The second option is the commercial OFS. Commercial OFS provides stable performance and sufficient network interfaces. However, it cannot be modified with innovated processing logic to update with evolving SDN/OpenFlow specifications. Commercial OFS is an SDN-enabled platform for mature applications but not a good SDN-innovation platform for research. NetFPGA, as the third methodology, offers the opportunities for users to change the hardware logic through FPGA [1]. NetFPGA is quite successful for networking research, but it has limitations when using for SDN innovation. The first generation NetFPGA-1G does not provide enough resources for OFS processing, e.g. flow tables, meters. And its PCI interface is the bottleneck to offload traffic to host CPU and remote controller. The second generation of NetFPGA-10G supports 10G fiber interface and contains more hardware resources, but there is no stable SDN/OpenFlow reference design for further research. In this paper, we have designed ONetSwitch, which is an “all programmable” SDN innovation platform with highperformance, low-power, flexibility and the minimized size (7 in* 7 in* 1.75 in). The “all programmable” feature is empowered by the emerging Xilinx Zynq SoC, which makes ONetSwitch software programmable and hardware restructural. We also present an OFS design based ONetSwitch among many research scenarios over ONetSwitch.