Open-Source Software-Defined Wide Area Network: An Inter-Cloud Approach

This paper presents an open-source solution for Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). The data plane included two Mininet virtual machines (VMs) on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, each on a distinct physical machine and in different networks. Within the first one, three instances of Open vSwitch (OVS) were used to provide high network availability. Similarly, the second Mininet also had three such switches to enable the Local Area Network (LAN) communication. The flow tables of each OVS were updated by the SD-WAN controller using OpenFlow 1.4. The inter-networking was facilitated by a full-mesh of Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels backed-up by another full-mesh of Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) overlay networks. The control plane was represented by a cluster of two ONOS 2.5.0 Docker containerized instances to further increase the availability. Another cluster of Atomix containers acted as a storage element and enabled the ONOS containers to work together as a coherent group. Each Mininet emulated two hosts in order to evaluate the inter-cloud performance using the following scenarios: (1) seamless connectivity; (2) effective data rate and Round-Trip Time (RTT) comparison between GRE and VXLAN tunnels.