OpenDaylight Overview

OpenDaylight Overview

Open Daylight is open source SDN controller now has its fifth release called Boron at the time of writing this topic. ODL release naming structure starts from first element of periodic table starting from Hydrogen and releases at least two new release per year.

ODL has been now widely used on Green fields environment , Service Provides , Enterprises networks, multivendor support, Datacenter networking , Cloud , Full SDN campus network , resource Optimization , Network automation.

ODL supports various southbound protocol like OpenFlow, OVSDB which further communicates with standard hardware and Open vSwitch. These protocols also helps us to deploy ODL in multivendor environment and control different hardware from single console.

Various Open Daylight Modules

Open Daylight has integrated various modules and plugins which are further used for various datacenter functions required for SDN network setup. Some of the ODL modules are discussed below.

Authentication, Authorization & Accounting:

This module provides Authentication, Authorization and Accounting feature in SDN. Each of three features has different function.

• Authentication: It is used to provide or check authenticity of users and machine using SDN.
• Authorization: What actions or task users or machine are authorized to perform.
• Accounting: what task has been performed by users or machine, it records them.

BGP LS PCEP:

BGP path computation element protocol is the South bound protocol which is used between SDN controller and Routers to override routing and forwarding tables. It talks to routers and has a limited support on specific routers, whereas BGP LS (Link state) is a protocol that distributes link state information of routing protocols.

Application-layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO):

ALTO is the protocol that provides network information or we can say network view to SDN applications.

It has five services:

• Network Map Service: It provides the ALTO Network MAP to all ALTO clients
• Cost MAP Service: It provides the Cost between defined groupings.
• Filtered MAP service: In this ALTO clients send request more specific network map or cost map to ALTO server.
• Endpoint Cost Service: ALTO servers provides the cost of direct endpoints.
• Endpoint Property Service: By this service ALTO clients can see or lookup the properties for each individual clients.

Bit Indexed Explicit Replication:

In SDN Multicast traffic is also handled by controller, and it is the controller that provides the function and also build the global state table for multicast flows. Multicast packet enter a BIER domain via BFIR Bit-Forwarding ingress Router ( BIER  provides multicast routing in SDN network ) and leave the domain by or via Bit-Forwarding Egress Routers ( BFFR ) and when traffic enters the ingress BIER router add the BIER header to packet which has information of each BFER to forward the packet to it. Now A set of BFER to which this multicast packet is to be sent, those BFERs information is there in header.

CAPWAP:

CAPWAP is the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points southbound protocol or modules that helps in managing the wireless network, AP by ODL.