Virtual Open Systems Scientific Publications

Introduction

Virtual switch solutions with configurable data-plane are one of the key component of Software Defined Networking (SDN) [1] and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [2]. These concepts are also emerging in Edge and Fog Computing [3][4] and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where they bring a much more flexible network architecture [5]. One of the most common way to control an SDN-enabled switch is the OpenFlow [6] protocol, which enables the possibility to add, update, remove and monitor the switch forwarding flow tables and their flow rules. Thus, OpenFlow-enabled virtual switches are becoming central elements of modern network architecture, including edge infrastructures.

In this paper we present the novel OpenFlow implementation added to VOSYSwitch [7], the Virtual Open Systems virtual switch solution based on the open-source framework Snabb [8][9]. Such OpenFlow implementation (based on specification version v1.3 [10]) has the distinctive particularity to translate the OpenFlow flow entries dynamically in Lua language via the PCAP Filter language [11] (also used in the popular tcpdump tool).

For such translation, it leverages on the fast Lua network packet filtering library pflua [12], which is able to compile PCAP filters, and on the just-in-time trace compiler LuaJIT [13]. It is worth mentioning, that this translation concept can be applied to other network standards equivalent to OpenFlow, such as P4 [14]. Additionally a set of benchmark is included to showcase the performance reached by this OpenFlow implementation.

The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows: Related works are presented in Section II and in Section III the VOSYSwitch OpenFlow bridge architecture and implementation is described. Section IV provides performance results and analysis while Section V concludes the paper.