To develop P4T, NGSDN tutorial (https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/ngsdn-tutorial/) is used as a reference. We followed some of its exercises, and then implemented our own topology. Additionally, we made some changes in the gNMI CLI to remotely access the ONOS controller. This testbed leverages the power of P4-based BMv2 switches and Mininet and provides a comprehensive but simplified platform to simulate SDN-based network topology.

• Advanced data plane programming and control via P4 and P4Runtime
• Robust configuration using YANG, OpenConfig, and gNMI
• The Stratum switch OS
• The ONOS SDN controller

System requirements

1. Download a pre-packaged VM with all included; OR
2. Manually install Docker and other dependencies.

The following components are required for manual Docker installation:

• Docker v1.13.0 and later (with docker-compose)
• Python 3
• Bash-like Unix shell
• Wireshark (optional)

We build our SDN experimental setup and application development stack by combining free and open-source components. Our main computing resource was a Huawei server outfitted with a powerful Xeon processor. We used 32 GB of RAM at our disposal to execute memory-intensive operations and allocated to two virtual machines (VMs) developed for our testing. The Mininet and BMv2 components were hosted in a single VM1 with 16 GB of RAM. The VM2 was given 10 GB of RAM and was used to install ONOS instances. The server included SAS storage with a 2TB storage capacity for data storage. We also assigned a 200 GB virtual hard disk drive (VHDD) for specialized storage and virtualization requirements. To develop and administer our network emulations, we used Mininet version 2.3.1. The Linux distribution we used was Ubuntu 20.04.5. As our major computing resource, we used an Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4210 CPU, equipping the system with 6 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) to efficiently spread processing workloads. Our virtualization infrastructure was built on VMware ESXi version 7.0 U2, a solid platform that provided us with advanced virtualization capabilities, boosting the efficiency of our tests even further. This extensive experimental setup gave us the computational capacity and resources we needed to conduct our research efficiently.

Get this repo or pull latest changes

To work on the exercises you will need to clone this repo:

cd ~  git clone -b advanced https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/ngsdn-tutorial

If the ngsdn-tutorial directory is already present, make sure to update its content:

cd ~/ngsdn-tutorial
git pull origin advanced

Download / upgrade dependencies

Upgrade the dependencies to the latest version using the following command:

cd ~/ngsdn-tutorial
make deps

Tutorial commands

To facilitate working on the exercises, A set of make-based commands are provided to control the different aspects of the tutorial. Commands will be introduced in the exercises, here's a quick reference:

Make command	Description
make deps	Pull and build all required dependencies
make p4-build	Build P4 program
make p4-test	Run PTF tests
make start	Start Mininet and ONOS containers
make stop	Stop all containers
make restart	Restart containers clearing any previous state
make onos-cli	Access the ONOS CLI (password: rocks, Ctrl-D to exit)
make onos-log	Show the ONOS log
make mn-cli	Access the Mininet CLI (Ctrl-D to exit)
make mn-log	Show the Mininet log (i.e., the CLI output)
make app-build	Build custom ONOS app
make app-reload	Install and activate the ONOS app
make netcfg	Push netcfg.json file (network config) to ONOS

Exercises

Click on the following exercis to see the instructions:

1. P4Runtime basics
2. Yang, OpenConfig, and gNMI basics
3. Using ONOS as the control plane
4. Enabling ONOS built-in services
5. Implementing IPv4 routing with ECMP