A Software Defined Approach to Unified IPv6 Transition

A Presentation to SDNRG

Vancouver, 5 Nov 2013

Multae Gentes

•  Spencer Dawkins, Huawei •  Guillaume Leclanche, Viagenie •  Diego Lopez, Telefonica I+D •  Felix Lu, Huawei •  Qiong Sun, China Telecom •  Tina Tsou, Huawei •  Wenfeng Xia, Univ. of Sci. & Tech. of China •  Chongfeng Xie, China Telecom •  Haiyong Xie, Huawei

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Status Quo in IPv6 Transition

•  Slow transition •  Many solutions and multiple scenarios co-exist •  Equipment does not support multiple IPv6 transition technologies at

the same time •  Operational complexity and risks in the phased approaches 3

The Goals

•  Design a unified approach to IPv6 transition •  Supported by uniform equipment

•  Low deployment and operational costs •  In despite of the migration path •  And even able to adapt to diferent ones •  Able to accommodate existing and future

IPv6 transition •  Keep user/application control on the when

and how to start the transition 4

Applying SDN

•  Decouple network equipment and the operation of specific IPv6 transition schemes •  The archetypal data/control planes separation in SDN

•  Decouple network equipment and the implementation of specific IPv6 transition schemes •  Relying on a NBI supporting the dynamic management of

IPv6 transition apps

•  As a result, support a flexible and adaptive framework for IPv6 transition •  And move towards network DevOps

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The Architecture •  SDN forwarding elements at the IP edge •  IPv6 transition schemas are implemented as SDN Apps

•  Loadable plugins for the controller

•  OSS uses a NBI to load apps and configure them

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The Data and Control Flows

•  Require support for IP-in-IP encapsulation in OpenFlow •  Being discussed as an extension •  MTU issues

•  Require a NBI spec able to support plugin deployment 7

The Lab Experiments

•  Use flow generators to generate a varying number of flows

•  Use commodity hardware

•  The results showed that a reasonably large number of flows could be handled with very high cost-performance efficiency

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The First Live Experiment •  Internet access for 270+ participants at the ETSI

Network Function Virtualization 2nd meeting on 22-23 April 2013

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And a Second One •  Internet access for 800+ participants the Global Open

Networking and SDN Conference 2013 in Beijing on 29-30 August 2013

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IPv4

IPv6

Legacy network region (IPv4 only)

SDN -Enabled

Controller

Applications

Access node

Access node

Access node

Access node

Edge device

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host

v4 or v6 host Plug-in

Experiment network region (IPv6 only)

Provide protocol-independent data model & programmatic interface for new applications/technologies creation

Monitoring the Live Labs

0

50

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# Users

8:30 AM

9:30 AM

11:00 AM

12:00 PM

1:30 PM

3:00 PM

4:00 PM

Time

4/22/2013 4/23/2013

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Monitoring Results

0%

20%

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100%

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Perc

enta

ge F

low

Set

-up

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e<0.

7ms

Flow

Set

-up

Tim

e (m

s)

Flow Set-up Time

Packet Latency in Data Plane

0%

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Perc

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ge R

TT <

4m

s (h

ost

<-->

bord

er ro

uter

)

Percentage RTT<4ms 12

An OSS-like Mobile App

•  Demonstration of the NBI concepts •  Controls the deployment and

configuration of several IPv6 transition mechanisms •  Illustrated through the Santa Clara live experiment

•  Available for Android and iOS •  http://www.huawei.com/enmobile/app/ •  Google Play •  (Apple Store soon)

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As a Summary

•  SDN is applicable to ease IPv6 transition •  Low cost

•  High performance

•  Unifying existing IPv6 schemes

•  A practical solution for this has been demonstrated •  Eating our own dog food

•  Mature enough to go for real deployment

•  In the path of network DevOps •  Extensibility via programmability

•  Implementation, deployment and operation

•  Streamline the OSS

For more details, please refer to our ACM SIGCOMM 2013 poster titled “A Software Defined Approach to Unified IPv6 Transition”

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More on This at IETF 88

•  Demo at Bits 'N Bites •  7th November, 19:00-21:00. Regency Ballroom D,E,F

•  Several -00 drafts •  draft-sun-openv6-problem-statement-00, Problem Statement for

Openv6 Scheme •  draft-liu-openv6-architecture-00, Openv6 Architecture for IPv6

Deployment •  draft-sun-v6ops-openv6-address-pool-management-00, Address

Management for IPv6 Transition •  draft-zhou-netmod-openv6-transition-cfg-00, A YANG Data

Model for Open IPv6 Transition

•  And a call for a Bar BoF

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