Experience in Implementing & Deploying a Non-IP Routing Protocol VIRO in GENI

In this paper, we describe our experience in implementing a non-IP routing protocol - Virtual Id Routing (VIRO) - using the OVS-SDN platform in GENI. As a novel, "plug-&-play", routing paradigm for future dynamic networks, VIRO decouples routing/forwarding from addressing by introducing a topology-aware, structured virtual id layer to encode the locations of switches and devices in the physical topology for scalable and resilient routing. Despite its general "match-action" forwarding function, the existing OVS-SDN platform is closely tied to the conventional Ethernet/IP/TCP header formats, and cannot be directly used to implement the new VIRO routing/forwarding paradigm. As a result, we repurpose the Ethernet MAC address to represent VIRO virtual id, modify and extend the OVS (both within the user space and the kernel space) to implement the VIRO forwarding functions. We also utilize a set of local POX controllers (one per VIRO switch) to emulate the VIRO distributed control plane and one global POX controller to realize the VIRO (centralized) management plane. We evaluate our prototype implementation through the Mininet emulation and GENI deployment test and discuss some lessons learned using the test-bed.