CORD : M-CORD Networks

In CORD, VTN supports the following network types:

• PRIVATE: private local network

• PUBLIC: external accessible network

• MANAGEMENT_LOCAL: management network with limited access from instance's host compute machine

• MANAGEMENT_HOST: extension of a physical management network, the instance connected to this network is accessible from all others machines or instances in the management network

• ACCESS_AGENT: special network for an access agent instance

• VSG: special network for a vSG instances

For more information regarding VTN design, please see VTN Design Note. In M-CORD, each instance may have up to 5 network interfaces in total. These include:

1. shared-net (PRIVATE) - the shared network is a private local network for the VMs to communicate with each other. This channel will allow UE traffic to travel for VNF to VNF before eventually leaving for the internet.
   
   
2. wan-net (PRIVATE) - the WAN is used to connect the vPGW to the internet. Therefore, only vPGW instances will have this network interface.
   
   
3. vsg-net (VSG) - the VSG network is a special type of VLAN network that will be used to connect the RRH (remote radio head) with the vBBU instance. The RRH is the radio processing equipment and must be implemented in hardware, unlike the BBU, which can be virtualized. Because of this, we must implement it separately from the shared-net (see above).
   
   
4. management-hosts (MANAGEMENT_HOST) - to support RAN slicing, the ONOS controller must be able to communicate with the vBBU VMs. This is not trivial, as ONOS is a control plane container running on the head node, while the vBBU VMs are running on compute nodes. To allow communication, we connect the BBU Slice to the management-hosts network, thus assigning it an infrastructure management IP address on the same network as the controller.
   
   
5. management-local (MANAGEMENT_LOCAL) - a network administrator can use the management local network interface to log into and configure any VM located on a compute node from said compute node.