Design and implementation of the OFELIA FP7 facility: The European OpenFlow testbed

Abstract

The growth of the Internet in terms of number of devices, the number of networks associated to each device and the mobility of devices and users makes the operation and management of the Internet network infrastructure a very complex challenge. In order to address this challenge, innovative solutions and ideas must be tested and evaluated in real network environments and not only based on simulations or laboratory setups.OFELIA is an European FP7 project and its main objective is to address the aforementioned challenge by building and operating a multi-layer, multitechnology and geographically distributed Future Internet testbed facility, where the network itself is precisely controlled and programmed by the experimenter using the emerging OpenFlow technology. This paper reports on the work done during the first half of the project, the lessons learned as well as the key advantages of the OFELIA facility for developing and testing new networking ideas. An overview on the challenges that have been faced on the design and implementation of the testbed facility is described, including the OFELIA Control Framework testbed management software. In addition, early operational experience of the facility since it was opened to the general public, providing five different testbeds or islands, is described.

An OpenFlow Implementation for Network Processors

“…As a result, said elements, which we will refer to as "ALIEN devices" in the remainder of this paper, can be integrated in an OpenFlow deployment. As a first step, we expect to see ALIEN devices introduced in SDN experimental facilities such as OFELIA [2], and then, at a later stage, in carrier-grade environments [3]. In a nutshell, HAL comprises a hardware-agnostic (or cross-hardware platform layer) and a hardware-specific part.…”

Experiences monitoring and managing QoS using SDN on testbeds supporting different innovation stages

“…Different experimental testbed facilities support experimenters at different innovation stages. For innovators there are experimental testbeds such as the OFELIA experimental facility [6]. For early adopters and the early majority there are pre-commercial facilities such as BonFIRE [4] and federated testbeds made up of FIWARE Lab instances created under the XIFI project [5].…”

Security in software defined networks

“…In addition to our emulation based experiments using Mininet, we also conducted the same experiment on the OFELIA SDN test-bed [32]. Our goal was to replicate the topology shown in Figure 4.3.…”

“…To validate the feasibility of the attack on real networks, we also conducted the basic attack on the OFELIA test-bed [32]. In our experiment, we replicated the ARP spoofing attack scenario discussed above and shown in Figure 5.…”

“…In particular, we consider FlowVisor [27] and OpenVirteX (OVX) [28], the two most relevant SDN hypervisor platforms commonly deployed in network test-beds, e.g. OFELIA [32], GENI [118], FITS [173], etc. OVX is an integrated component of the widely used ONOS SDN controller platform.…”