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RouteFlow

RouteFlow is a platform for providing virtualized IP routing services on top of OpenFlow networks.

You can learn more about RouteFlow in our page in GitHub, in the wiki and in our website.

RouteFlow depends on many different pieces of software to work; please be aware of POX, OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, Quagga, MongoDB, jQuery, JIT and RouteFlow licenses and terms.

Distribution overview

The RouteFlow core is composed by three basic applications: RFClient, RFServer and RFProxy.

  • RFClient runs as a daemon in the Virtual Machine (VM), detecting changes in the Linux ARP and routing tables. Routing information is sent to the RFServer when there's an update.

  • RFServer is a standalone application that connects to and manages the RFClient instances running in VMs. The RFServer keeps the mapping between the RFClient instances and interfaces and the corresponding switches and ports. It connects to RFProxy to configure flows mapped from the virtual environment.

  • RFProxy is an application (for POX and other controllers) responsible for the interactions with the OpenFlow switches (identified by datapaths) via the OpenFlow protocol. It listens to instructions from the RFServer and notifies it about events in the network. We recommend running POX when you are experimenting and testing your network. Other implementations in different controllers are available using the build.sh script.

High-availability is possible through the use of the optional RFMonitor module.

There is also a library of common functions (rflib). It has implementations of the IPC, utilities like custom types for IP and MAC addresses manipulation and OpenFlow message creation.

Additionally, there's rfweb, an extra module that provides an web interface for RouteFlow.

Building

If you just want to get started, follow these first steps. If you're developing or diving deeper, there are more advanced options, modules and newer versions of dependencies that can be installed through the build.sh script. See its source for more information.

  1. Install the dependencies (we strongly recommend Ubuntu 12.04):
sudo apt-get install build-essential git libboost-dev \
  libboost-program-options-dev libboost-thread-dev \
  libboost-filesystem-dev iproute-dev openvswitch-switch \
  mongodb python-pymongo
  1. Clone RouteFlow's repository on GitHub:
$ git clone git://github.com/routeflow/RouteFlow.git
  1. Build rfclient
make rfclient

That's it! Now you can run tests 1 and 2. The setup to run them is described in the "Running" section.

Running

The folder rftest contains all that is needed to create and run two test cases.

Virtual environment

First, create the default LXC containers that will run as virtual machines:

$ cd rftest
$ sudo ./create

The containers will have a default ubuntu/ubuntu user/password combination. You should change that if you plan to deploy RouteFlow.

By default, the tests below will use the LXC containers created by the create script. You can use other virtualization technologies. If you have experience with or questions about setting up RouteFlow on a particular technology, contact us! See the "Support" section.

Test scenarios

Default configuration files are provided for these scenarios in the rftest directory (you don't need to change anything). You can stops them at any time by pressing CTRL+C.

rftest1

For a description of this scenario, see its tutorial.

  1. Run:
$ sudo ./rftest1
  1. You can then log in to the LXC container b1 and try to ping b2:
$ sudo lxc-console -n b1
  1. Inside b1, run:
# ping 172.31.2.2

rftest2

For a description of this scenario, see its tutorial.

This test should be run with a Mininet simulated network. In the steps below, replace [guest address] with the IP address you use to access your Mininet VM. The same applies to [host address], that should be the address to access the host from inside the VM.

  1. Run:
$ sudo ./rftest2
  1. Once you have a Mininet VM up and running, copy the network topology files in rftest to the VM:
$ scp topo-4sw-4host.py mininet@[guest address]:/home/mininet/mininet/custom
$ scp ipconf mininet@[guest address]:/home/mininet
  1. Then start the network:
$ sudo mn --custom mininet/custom/topo-4sw-4host.py --topo=rftest2 --controller=remote,ip=[host address],port=6633 --pre=ipconf

Wait for the network to converge (it should take a few seconds), and try to ping:

mininet> pingall
...
mininet> h2 ping h3

Now what?

If you want to use the web interface to inspect RouteFlow behavior, see the wiki page on rfweb.

If you want to create your custom configurations schemes for a given setup, check out the configuration section of the first tutorial and the guide on how to create your virtual environment.

See the build.sh script for advanced options. You'll probably want to use it if you are doing research or exploring some new feature. See its source for more information.

Support

If you want to know more or need to contact us regarding the project for anything (questions, suggestions, bug reports, discussions about RouteFlow and SDN in general) you can use the following resources:

RouteFlow - Copyright (c) CPqD