Welcome to FIWARE OFNIC GE’s documentation!¶

Introduction¶

OFNIC provides a programmable interface to control and retrieve information and control Openflow Networks. The interface is based on the RESTful paradigm and is powered by a Web Server developed in Python programming language. OFNIC relies on the Openflow protocol in order to abstract and virtualize forwarding capabilities of the Openflow Network. This GEi is an extension to the OpenDaylight Openflow controller.

OFNIC is composed of many modules which communicate whith each other with events. It is designed with an event-driven paradigm also to manage information that comes from the network. The OFNIC RESTful interface is an instance of the NetIC API ( NetIC Generic Enabler Open Specifications can be found here).

Goal of this document is to provide a useful guide for developers who want to build new applications based on the NetIC API, and a guide for users that might utilize the provided GUI application. Specific sections are dedicated to developer tools intended to help them during development, test and deployment.

OFNIC GUI¶

The OFNIC GEi is released with a GUI feature. The NetIC API users might utilize the GUI to navigate the exposed RESTful webservices of the GEi. The GUI has been developed in Javascript language, and uses the FIWARE site template. The web GUI comes embedded in the OFNIC source package release, see the OFNIC Installation-and-Administration guide to download the package.

The GUI relies on the OFNIC GEi, it should up and running correctly. To access the GUI from a web browser navigate to: http://localhost/gui

The GUI page that appears is shown in the figure below.

The default username is ‘admin’ and can be authenticated with the password ‘admin’. After logging in, one can note that the GUI is composed of four navigation tabs: Synchronization,Statistics, Routing, and Access Control. The Synchronization tab shows the network topology with an interactive diagram. Network nodes are clickable and additional information is shown if a node is selected. For example the number of Actions or Ports. Moreover the Displayed ports are clickable and show to which other network entity is the selected node connected to.

The Statistics navigation tab, concerns about the presentation of network statistics collected by the OFNIC GEi. The dynamic network topology is present so the user can select nodes he might want to monitor from the graph. The Statistics tab is shown in the figure below.

The presence of the Openflow network is not mandatory, if no network is attached to the OFNIC GEi, the following warning will appear on the GUI: “no network nodes detected”

Navigation with browser¶

The root path of the Web Server is:

http://localhost:8000/api-docs

This page, by using the Swagger plugin, shows all commands that can be sent to the REST API of OFNIC.

Examples¶

In this example the OFNIC GEi is connected to an Openflow network composed of three Openflow nodes. The nodes run Openvswitch for implementing the Openflow protocol. The OFNIC GEi is located at the same machine from which the browser is used. Using the browser, type in the location bar the following URL string and then press Enter.

https://127.0.0.1/netic.v1/OFNIC/synchronize/network

The result displayed, should be the list of nodes present in the network:

{ “paths”:[], “nodes”:[ “00:00:00:00:00:00:00:02”, “00:00:00:00:00:00:00:01”, “00:00:00:00:00:00:00:03”] “hosts”:[]}

As one can note from the examples, all response bodies are in JSON format. For the full RESTful API specification refers to https://fiware-uniroma1.github.io/FIWARE-OFNIC/

Software and Hardware environment¶

The OFNIC OpenFlow controller runs in a Java Virtual Machine. Being a Java application, it can (potentially) runs on any machine that supports Java. However, all the software have been tested on recent Linux distributions, so we recommend the following:

• A recent Linux distribution (for example Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or Debian 7.x)
• Java Virtual Machine 1.7

Prerequisites¶

• As the previous paragraph, being a Java application, the only requistite is Java Virtual Machine.

Getting OFNIC¶

There are two options for obtaining the OFNIC Controller. The first option is to download the pre-built current build. The second option is to getting the source code of the component and build the code on your machine.

The pre-built package can be downloaded at TBD

https://github.com/FIWARE-UNIROMA1/FIWARE-OFNIC

Another way of getting the source code is to pull the code by cloning the controller repository on GitHub with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/FIWARE-UNIROMA1/FIWARE-OFNIC.git

Build the code¶

Prerequisites¶

The following are required for building the codebase:

• Maven 3.x.y

If you use a Debian or Ubuntu machine, you can install Maven with the following command:

sudo apt-get install maven

and check the installed version with:

mvn -v

Using a system shell locate in the main OFNIC source code directory, where is located the pom.xml maven’s configuration file. Run the following commands:

mvn clean install

Running¶

Now OFNIC GEi is ready to start running. With a terminal locate in the main folder with the following content:

• opendaylight build folder
• ofnic.conf
• ofnic-uniroma1.jar
• qos_queue.con
• run.sh

The command reported below starts the OFNIC controller:

./run.sh

End to End testing¶

This is basically quick testing to check that everything is up and running.

1. Launch ofnic with the command:

   ./run.sh

2. To verify that the OFNIC GEi is loaded correctly it should display bootstrap complete in the terminal on which it was launched.

3. Network nodes side, on ovs switch give the following command to verify that the device is correctly connected with the controller :

   ovs-vsctl show

it should display the following log message:

• Bridge “br0”
• Controller “tcp:127.0.0.1” is_connected: true
• Port “br0”
• Interface “br0” type: internal

4. After this two checks have been done, the GEi should be up and ready. To test that is actually running a simple check can be done from the browser. Going with a normal internet browser application to the following address:

   http://localhost:8000/api-docs

should display the list of all API of OFNIC GEi.

List of Running Processes¶

In order to list running processes on a Linux distribution one can use ps aux command. In order to get more filtered results one can use this more articulated command:

ps aux | grep “Name_of_process”

In the machine that hosts the OFNIC GEi the run.sh process is required to be active. So by typing in the terminal:

ps aux | grep run.sh

Network interfaces Up & Open¶

The OFNIC GEi listens to the ports 6633, 2222 and 8080, with the following command you can verify it:

netstat -lnptu | grep tcp

in the terminal you will see a list of the process listen on port 6633, 8080 and 2222.

Resource availability¶

The required RAM depends on many factors such as network topology, number of flows in the network, frequency of the statistics updates, frequency of web service requests, etc.

• Generally RAM size varies from 100 MB to 250 MB.
• Usually the disk size required during run time is negligible.

Remote Service Access¶

User can verify the correct execution of the OFNIC, by directing the browser (all types are supported) to the following page:

http://localhost:8000/api-docs

which should display a list of commands that can be sent to the interface. Note that if the browser app is not on the same machine of the GE, the remote IP address of the GEi can be used.

Resource consumption¶

The resource consumption is highly dependent on the number of network events processed. The minimum amount of RAM is nearly 200 MB so eventually in any lower amount of RAM means that the application did not load properly. Under normal working conditions RAM size reaches the order of 250 MB so values of greater orders mean that there is some malfunctioning. CPU percentage ranges and is highly dependent on the processor speed. However it should be noted that at idle state the OFNIC processor consumption can be even lower that 0.1%.

I/O flows¶

Port 2222 for RESTful API and port 6633 for the communication with the network nodes via OpenFlow plugin.