Atrium User Guide

Overview

Project Atrium is an open source SDN distribution - a vertically integrated set of open source components which together form a complete SDN stack. It’s goals are threefold:

  • Close the large integration-gap of the elements that are needed to build an SDN stack - while there are multiple choices at each layer, there are missing pieces with poor or no integration.
  • Overcome a massive gap in interoperability - This exists both at the switch level, where existing products from different vendors have limited compatibility, making it difficult to connect an arbitrary switch and controller and at an API level, where its difficult to write a portable application across multiple controller platforms.
  • Work closely with network operators on deployable use-cases, so that they could download near production quality code from one location, and get started with functioning software defined networks on real hardware.

Architecture

The key components of Atrium BGP Peering Router Application are as follows:

  • Data Plane Switch - Data plane switch is the entity that uses flow table entries installed by BGP Routing Application through SDN controller. In the simplest form data plane switch with the installed flows act like a BGP Router.
  • OpenDaylight Controller - OpenDaylight SDN controller has many utility applications or plugins which are leveraged by the BGP Router application to manage the control plane information.
  • BGP Routing Application - An application running within the OpenDaylight runtime environment to handle I-BGP updates.
  • DIDM - DIDM manages the drivers specific to each data plane switch connected to the controller. The drivers are created primarily to hide the underlying complexity of the devices and to expose a uniform API to applications.
  • Flow Objectives API - The driver implementation provides a pipeline abstraction and exposes Flow Objectives API. This means applications need to be aware of only the Flow Objectives API without worrying about the Table IDs or the pipelines.
  • Control Plane Switch - This component is primarily used to connect the OpenDaylight SDN controller with the Quagga Soft-Router and establish a path for forwarding E-BGP packets to and from Quagga.
  • Quagga soft router - An open source routing software that handles E-BGP updates.

Running Atrium

  • To run the Atrium BGP Routing Application in OpenDaylight distribution, simply install the odl-atrium-all feature.

    feature:install odl-atrium-all