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tinyNBI: distilling an API from essential OpenFlow abstractions

Published: 22 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

If simplicity is a key strategy for success as a network protocol OpenFlow is not winning. At its core OpenFlow presents a simple idea, which is a network switch data plane abstraction along with a control protocol for manipulating that abstraction. The result of this idea has been far from simple: a new version released each year, five active versions, complex feature dependencies, unstable version negotiation, lack of state machine definition, etc. This complexity represents roadblocks for network, software, and hardware engineers.
We have distilled the core abstractions present in 5 existing versions of OpenFlow and refactored them into a simple API called tinyNBI. Our work does not provide high level network abstractions (address pools, VPN maps, etc.), instead it focuses on providing a clean low level interface that supports the development of these higher layer abstractions. The goal of tinyNBI is to allow configuration of all existing OpenFlow abstractions without having to deal with the unique personalities of each version of OpenFlow or their level of support in target switches.

References

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Flowgrammable.org. freeflow. http://flowgrammable.org/freeflow/, 2014.
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N. Foster, R. Harrison, M.J. Freedman, C. Monsanto, J. Rexford, A. Story, and D. Walker. Frenetic: A network programming language. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 46(9):279--291, 2011.
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A. Guha, M. Reitblatt, and N. Foster. Machine-verified network controllers. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, pages 483--494, 2013.
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Andreas Voellmy, Ashish Agarwal, and Paul Hudak. Nettle: Functional reactive programming for openflow networks. Technical report, DTIC Document, 2010.
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  • (2017)Towards the Semantic Web Based Northbound Interface for SDN Resource Management2017 IEEE 11th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC)10.1109/ICSC.2017.27(40-47)Online publication date: 2017
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HotSDN '14: Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
August 2014
252 pages
ISBN:9781450329897
DOI:10.1145/2620728
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 22 August 2014

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Author Tags

  1. nbi
  2. north bound interface
  3. openflow
  4. sbi
  5. sdn
  6. software defined networking
  7. south bound interface

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  • Research-article

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SIGCOMM'14
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SIGCOMM'14: ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference
August 22, 2014
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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HotSDN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 114 submissions, 44%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)A Comprehensive Survey on Knowledge-Defined NetworkingTelecom10.3390/telecom40300254:3(477-596)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2023
  • (2017)Tablevisor 2.0: Towards full-featured, scalable and hardware-independent multi table processing2017 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)10.1109/NETSOFT.2017.8004108(1-8)Online publication date: Jul-2017
  • (2017)Towards the Semantic Web Based Northbound Interface for SDN Resource Management2017 IEEE 11th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC)10.1109/ICSC.2017.27(40-47)Online publication date: 2017
  • (2016)RAPTOR: A REST API translaTOR for OpenFlow controllers2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2016.7562096(328-333)Online publication date: Apr-2016
  • (2016)Enabling Dynamic Reconfigurability of SDRs Using SDN PrinciplesAd Hoc Networks10.1007/978-3-319-51204-4_30(369-381)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2016
  • (2016)Empirical Evidences in Software-Defined Network Security: A Systematic Literature ReviewInformation Fusion for Cyber-Security Analytics10.1007/978-3-319-44257-0_11(253-295)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2016
  • (2015)Safer SDN programming through ArbiterACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2936314.281421851:3(65-74)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2015
  • (2015)Safer SDN programming through ArbiterProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2814204.2814218(65-74)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2015
  • (2015)CrossFlow: A cross-layer architecture for SDR using SDN principles2015 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (NFV-SDN)10.1109/NFV-SDN.2015.7387403(37-39)Online publication date: Nov-2015
  • (2015)Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive SurveyProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2014.2371999103:1(14-76)Online publication date: Jan-2015
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