Stanford Deployment

The production network in the 3A wing of William Gates Building at Stanford University is OpenFlow-enabled and all traffic is switched using OpenFlow. In our network, we deploy 1GE OpenFlow-enabled switches from HP, NEC and Toroki, 30 WiFi APs based on the ALIX PCEngine boxes, and 1 NEC WiMAX base-station.

Topology Overview

We operate three different OpenFlow networks as part of the Stanford deployment:

• Production: VLAN74, ~10 wired users, 6 switches
• Experimental: VLAN374, with ~15 wireless users and 3 PlanetLab nodes, 35 switches (31APs + 4 switches)
• Demonstration: VLAN901, with ~6 demo slices over FlowVisor, 6 switches
  • aggregation, envi, elastictree, openpipes, openroads, plugnserve

We use SNAC as the controller for both the Production and Experimental network. The Demo network is sliced, by the FlowVisor, into several individual slices, each of which use their own NOX-based controller. The following figure summarizes the topology of the network.

Staged Deployment

We undertook the following steps to gradually create our network:

• Phase 0: Separate test network in the lab
  • Goal: To get familiar with technology.
• Phase 1: Deploy OpenFlow switches inline with production network
  • Initially turn off OpenFlow (this is where we are for most of Gates Building)
• Phase 2: Create 1 OpenFlow instance, which is internal
  • Set up controller and run OpenFlow test traffic for measurements
• Phase 3: Create 1 OpenFlow instance, which is externally reachable
  • Start migrating limited user base to OpenFlow network
• Phase 4: Experimental
  • Install FlowVisor and start slicing the network
  • Allow Experiments on the network (this is where we are now for Gates 3A wing)

Classes of Traffic

Type	Legacy Prod.	OpenFlow Prod.	OpenFlow Exp.
Admin:	Sysadmin	Sysadmin	Researcher
Switched by:	Vendor Software (e.g. HP, NEC)	OpenFlow Controller (Production)	OpenFlow Controller (FlowVisor + Many)
FlowVisor:	No	Yes	Yes
Users:	Control Plane, Mission Critical	Anyone	Based on Opt-In
Uptime Goal:	Same as current	99%	95%
Privacy:	Good	Good	Very Limited

For more information and weekly status reports, visit the wiki page

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