OpenFlow testbed

NITOS facility provides remote access to OpenFlow switches, enabling the user to create an OpenFlow slice, related to an experiment slice that has already available. The OpenFlow slice is implemented by the FlowVisor, a Stanford's software tool that creates slices on the OpenFlow switches, enabling the parallel access to them by separate users. In a transparent way from the user perspective, the switches ports, which are used by the user's reserved nodes, are assigned to the user's OpenFlow slice. The whole process is orchestrated by the NITOS scheduler, configuring appropriately the FlowVisor at the beggining of a new reservation slot.

In summary, the remote user of the NITOS facility is able to reserve nodes for his slice (through the NITOS scheduler) and run an OpenFlow experiment with use of this slice. In particular, the testbed provides transparently an abstract OpenFlow switch for his slice, that conceptually is equivalent to a physical OpenFlow switch that includes only the ports of the nodes that he has reserved. The OpenFlow controller that defines the functionality of this abstract switch, should listen both on the host machine and the TCP port that are illustrated in the OpenFlow settings, in the User Menu on the right of the page (requires registration). The following figure illustrates the NITOS OpenFlow testbed topology, as well as the slicing mechanism.