Design and implementation of LISP controller in ONOS

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to address the demands for flexible and agile network controllability. The fundamental idea of SDN is the physical separation of the network control plane from the data (forwarding) plane. This migration of control into programmable computing devices enables the underlying network infrastructures to be abstracted for applications and services. It brings many beneficial features such as programmability, agility, elasticity. Currently, OpenFlow is widely used as interfacing protocol between data and control planes. However, to practically deploy the SDN paradigm, OpenFlow is insufficient in terms of scalability, performance, heterogeneity, inter-operability with legacy networks and protocols. To overcome those limitations, we need to consider multiple protocols as South Bound Interface for SDN controllers. In this paper, we describe our experience to design and implement Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) in ONOS, which is an open source SDN OS for service providers. LISP is a tunneling based protocol to solve Internet scalability issue, and several recent studies show that LISP can be applied to various use cases to improve efficiency such as virtual machine live migration, multi-homing, and traffic engineering. Therefore, LISP is a good candidate to extend SDN's South Bound Interface. Furthermore, several use cases to effectively use LISP within SDN environments are introduced.