Construction Of Programmable Data Forwarding Plane Based On Openstack

With the rapid development of the Internet, new network protocols and technologies continue to emerge, which makes the traditional network architectures more and more complex. Since the implementation of networking technology has a close integration with the underlying network infrastructure, this greatly limits the innovation and development of the network. Software Defined Network (SDN) take a new network design pattern, it centralize all the network intelligence on the controller, and build a unified data forwarding plane, which is focused on packet exchange, this can not only simplify the network architecture but also make the network more programmable. Most function of a SDN network can be software-defined, which can reduce the cycle of network functionality innovation and low the deployment costs.Due to SDN’s freshness and centralized design pattern, applications on the controller side must be tested rigorously, before deployed to the production environment.The purpose of this project is to construct a testing environment for SDN applications on the controller. It can provide OpenFlow enabled switches, and assign them to the particular controller, by connecting VMs customized by users to these switches, it can emulate a SDN network. Compared with the existing SDN testing platforms, this project is based on open source IaaS cloud computing platform OpenStack, which can support multi-user, and has more scalability and fidelity.This paper firstly introduces the SDN-related background knowledge, such as the infrastructure of SDN network, OpenFlow protocol and so on, and then describes the OpenStack cloud platform in detail, including various OpenStack components, and the affiliation between OpenStack and SDN. By analyzing the OpenStack network component named neutron, we decide use resource extension to design and implement programmable data forwarding plane, mainly including: the design and implementation for neutron’s resource extension; the strategy for resource isolation, which is based on flow tables; the implementation for neutron agent’s driver and so on. Finally, we use a test case to verify the availability of programmable data forwarding plane.