The EHU-OEF: An OpenFlow-based Layer-2 experimental facility

Abstract

The current limitations of the Internet have prompted the appearance of the Future Internet initiative, which promotes the deployment of newly proposed infrastructures. In this context, experimental facilities emerge to provide realistic scenarios that allow the testing and advance the research of these novel approaches. From a technical standpoint, building a facility’s infrastructure is challenging and demanding because several requirements, such as its flexibility, support for multiple experiments, isolation and virtualisation, must be fulfilled. To investigate potential Future Internet initiatives, we designed, developed, and deployed our own experimental facility that addresses the aforementioned requirements: the EHU OpenFlow Enabled Facility (EHU-OEF). In this article, we present the EHU-OEF, which is a campus-wide facility based on OpenFlow that simultaneously supports both research and production traffic over the same infrastructure. Because this facility is based, in particular, on the OpenFlow technology and, more generally, follows the Software Defined Networking paradigm, the EHU-OEF provides researchers with the ability to programme the network. Thanks to this property, flexibility and isolation of both the control and the data planes among the experiments are addressed. This article also presents a novel method of network virtualisation at the link layer, the L2PNV approach, which ensures scalability by aggregating MAC addresses. This approach has been implemented with a modification of the FlowVisor controller originally developed at Stanford, which is a special-purpose OpenFlow controller that introduces a software slicing layer between OpenFlow switches and multiple OpenFlow controllers. This article also presents other contributions that have been developed through a successful deployment methodology in the facility, including an authentication and authorisation module, a MAC configuration module and a Prefix-Based Forwarding Decision module. In conclusion, the EHU-OEF facility possesses an excellent infrastructure designed to test and to validate novel proposals under real conditions, and this facility acts as a stepping stone for Future Internet testbeds.