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Interview with Orange Sr. Research Scientist Dr. Christos Kolias and Raj Murali, Director of the Linaro Network Group on LNG Networking & Demo Day at the Connect event. The interview focuses on discussion about network functions virtualization (NFV), software defined networking (SDN), and OpenDataPlane (ODP).

Dr. Kolias explains the motivations and goals of the NFV project while Mr. Murali discussed the state of the ODP project and how it relates to the wider goals of NFV and SDN. The OpenDataPlane project provides an efficient abstraction layer to permit data plane applications to run portably across a wide variety of networking SoC platforms and processor architectures while still exploiting the various acceleration and offload features of those platforms. Mr. Murali also discussed the OpenDataPlane demonstrations showcased at Linaro Connect 2014. ODP v1.0 is scheduled for delivery at the end of 2014.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) envisions and promises to change the service provider landscape and has emerged as one of one of today’s significant trends. Although less than two years old, NFV has garnered the industry’s full attention and support. Moving swiftly, a number of key accomplishments have already taken place, and a lot more work is currently under way within ETSI NFV while we are embarking on its future phase. Various proofs-of-concepts (ranging from vEPC to vCPE, vIMS and vCDN) are being developed while issues such as open source and SDN are becoming key ingredients as the can play a pivotal role.

The ODL-OVS demo shown at LCU14 showcases the OpenDataPlane project together with OpenDayLight SDN Controller using Open vSwitch to bridge the two projects.

OpenDataPlane is a framework for developing cross-platform user space dataplane applications, like it is the case with Open vSwitch. For this we have written a “netdev provider” based on ODP to make OVS capable to work on a variety of platforms through the abstractions provided by the ODP API. The OpenDaylight Controller’s role is to manage virtual OVS switches/bridges running on top of ODP, both through a GUI web interface as well as through a series of scripts that take advantage of the REST northbound API of the OpenDaylight Controller. The video also shows how to control OVS switches through the ovs-ofctl command line tool of OVS, that is equivalent to using an externally connected controller implementing the OpenFlow specification (like the OpenDaylight Controller).

Right now the ODP netdev layer for OVS runs on linux-generic using basic socket transport, and it is scheduled to be running on linux-dpdk and linux-keystone2 ODP platforms. For the purpose of the demo the ODP netdev layer doesn’t take advantage of ODP’s packet scheduler, it only sends and receives packets in burst mode. For that it might be necessary to implement a dpif provider, which is one layer upper in the design of Open vSwitch.