Introduction

Cavium XPliant® Fabric has been seamlessly integrated with ONOS controller (version 1.12 and up), allowing ONOS applications to manage the underlay physical infrastructure for CORD services.

XPliant® switches are programmable: XPliant Packet Architecture (XPA™), shown below, allows programming of every element of switch packet processing.

XPliant software stack leverages XPA™ flexibility to configure the switch to CORD-tailored pipeline implementation, optimizing the functions and the tables sizes to the solution specifics.

The user experience of operating ONOS Applications in CORD environment deploys Cavium XPliant® Fabric is seamless and remain the same as using non-programmable fixed-pipleline Fabrics.  

Cavium XPliant Software Stack for OpenFlow/CORD 

XPliant® software stack integrates OvS as the OpenFlow Agent and uses XPliant Adapter to implement OVS OF APIs and to translate them into XPliant Development Kit (XDK) OpenFlow APIs, as shown in the diagram below:

Cavium XPliant® Open APIs for the XPliant Programmable Switch (OpenXPS) open source software are available at https://github.com/XPliant/OpenXPS; namely openXpsOpenflow.h includes API prototypes and type definitions for the openXps OpenFlow Management functional calls.

Cavium XPliant CROF^TM Architecture

Cavium Real OpenFlow (CROF ^TM) is Cavium XPliant® software architecture to support OpenFlow-based implementations.

CROF ^TM, fully compliant with OpenFlow 1.3 specification principles and semantics, allows to programmatically build ambitious Openflow-based pipelines leveraging the native XPA ^TM primitives support.

CROF ^TM pipeline general view is shown below: 

Cavium XPliant CORD Pipeline

Cavium XPliant® implementation for ONOS-managed CORD is based on the Cavium Real OpenFlow (CROF ^TM) software architecture, mapping its' primitives to the schemes are used by ONOS Fabric Applications, such as 'segmentedrouting'. 

 ONOS-CORD pipeline general view is shown below: 

 

Benefits of using XPliant CORD Fabrics

Cavium XPliant® Fabric is the first programmable Fabric integrated with ONOS controller for CORD environments.

Seamlessly supporting ONOS operation model and keeping the user experience intact, Cavium XPliant® Programmable SDN Fabric enables a new dimension of flexibility to tailor the switch behavior and to optimize its resources allocations to various CORD deployments specifics. Cavium XPliant® Fabric extensibility provides the ability to evolve ONOS Applications for CORD to implement new protocols and enhanced analytics without hardware change.

For more details, contact Albert.Fishman@cavium.com.