software-2021-09-02-15-38-08-utc

Transport SDN

 

 

Transport SDN

Transport Software-Defined Networking (SDN) revolutionizes how networks are managed and operated. By decoupling the control and data planes, Transport SDN enables network operators to control and optimize their networks programmatically, leading to enhanced efficiency, agility, and scalability. In this blog post, we will explore the Transport SDN concept and its key benefits and applications.

Transport SDN is an architecture that brings the principles of SDN to the transport layer of the network. Traditionally, transport networks relied on static configurations, making them inflexible and difficult to adapt to changing traffic patterns and demands. Transport SDN introduces a centralized control plane that dynamically manages and configures the transport network elements, such as routers, switches, and optical devices.

 

Highlights: Transport SDN

  • Data and Control Planes

The traditional ways to build routing networks are where the SDN revolution is happening. Networks started with tight coupling between data and control planes. The control plane was distributed, meaning each node had a control element and performed its control plane activities. SDN changed this architecture, centralized the control plane with a controller, and used OpenFlow or another protocol to communicate with the data plane. However, all control functions are handled by a central controller, which has many scaling drawbacks.

  • Distribution and Centralized

Therefore, we seem to be moving to a scalable hybrid control plane architecture. The hybrid control plane is a mixture of distributed and centralized. Centralization offers global visibility, better network operations, and optimizations. However, a distributed control remains best for specific use cases, for example, IGP convergence. More importantly, a centralized element introduces additional value to the Wide Area Network (WAN) network, such as network traffic engineering (TE) placement optimization, aka Transport SDN.

 

For additional pre-information, you may find the following posts helpful:

  1. WAN Virtualization
  2. SDN Protocols
  3. SDN Data Center

 

  • A key point: Back to basics with the Transport SDN

Highlighting SDN

The two elements involved in forwarding packets through routers are a control function, which decides the route the traffic takes and the relative priority of traffic, and a data function, which delivers data based on control-function policy. Before the introduction of SDN, these functions were integrated into each network device. This inflexible approach requires all the network nodes to implement the same protocols. A central controller performs all complex functionality with SDN, including routing, naming, policy declaration, and security checks.

 

Critical Benefits of Transport SDN:

1. Improved Network Efficiency: Transport SDN allows for intelligent traffic engineering, enabling network operators to optimize network resources and minimize congestion. Transport SDN maximizes network efficiency and improves overall performance by dynamically adjusting routes and bandwidth allocation based on real-time traffic conditions.

2. Enhanced Network Agility: With Transport SDN, network operators can rapidly deploy new services and applications. Leveraging programmable interfaces and APIs can automate network provisioning, eliminating manual configurations and reducing deployment times from days to minutes. This level of agility enables organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs and market demands.

3. Increased Network Scalability: Transport SDN provides a scalable and flexible solution for network growth. Network operators can scale their networks independently by separating the control and data planes and adding or removing network elements. This scalability ensures that the network can keep pace with the ever-increasing demands for bandwidth without compromising performance or reliability.

Applications of Transport SDN:

1. Data Center Interconnect: Transport SDN enables seamless connectivity between data centers, allowing for efficient data replication, backup, and disaster recovery. Organizations can optimize resource utilization and ensure reliable and secure data transfer by dynamically provisioning and managing connections between data centers.

2. 5G Networks: Transport SDN plays a crucial role in deploying 5G networks. With the massive increase in traffic volume and diverse service requirements, Transport SDN enables network slicing, network automation, and dynamic resource allocation, ensuring efficient and high-performance delivery of 5G services.

3. Multi-Domain Networks: Transport SDN facilitates the management and orchestration of complex multi-domain networks. Providing a unified control plane enables seamless end-to-end service provisioning across different network domains, such as optical, IP, and microwave. This capability simplifies network operations and improves service delivery across diverse network environments.

 

Transport SDN: The SDN Design

SDN has two buckets, the Wide Area Network (WAN) and the Data Centre (DC). There is a difference between what SDN is trying to achieve in the WAN and what it is trying to achieve in the DC. Every point is connected within the DC, and you can assume unconstrained capacity.

A typical data center design is a leaf and spine architecture, where all nodes have equidistant endpoints. This is not the case in the WAN. The WAN has completely different requirements and must meet SLA with less bandwidth. The WAN and data center requirements are entirely different, resulting in two SDN models.

The SDN data center model builds logical network overlays over fully meshed, unconstrained physical infrastructure. The WAN does not follow this model. The SDN DC model aims to replace, while the SD-WAN model aims to augment. SD-WAN is built on SDN, and this SD WAN tutorial will bring you up to speed on the drivers for SD WAN overlay and the main environmental challenges forcing the need for WAN modernization.

We can evolve the IP/MPLS control plane to a hybrid one. We go from a fully distributed control plane architecture where we maintain as much of the distributed control plane as it makes sense (convergence). At the same time, produce a controller that can help you enhance the control plane functionality of the network and interact with applications. Global optimization of traffic engineering offers many benefits.

 

WAN is all about SLA

Service Providers offer Service Level Agreement (SLA) assurance ensuring sufficient capacity relative to the offered traffic load. Traffic Engineering (TE) and Intelligent load balancing aim to ensure sufficient capacity to deliver the promised SLA, routing customers’ traffic where the network capacity is. In addition, some WAN SPs use point-to-point LSP TE tunnels for individual customer SLAs. 

WAN networks are all about SLA, and there are several ways to satisfy them – Network Planning & Traffic Engineering. The better planning you do, the less TE you need. However, planning requires accurate traffic flow statistics to fully understand the network’s capabilities. Sometimes an accurate network traffic profile doesn’t exist, and many networks are vastly over-provisioned.

 

  • A key point: Netflow

Netflow is one of the most popular ways to measure your traffic mix. Routers collect “flow” information and export the data to a collector agent. There are different approaches to aggregate flows depending on the NetFlow version. Netflow version 5 is the most common, and version 9 offers MPLS-aware Netflow. BGP Policy Accounting and Destination Class Usage enables routers to collect aggregated destination statistics (limited to 16/64/126 buckets). BGP permits accounting for traffic mapping to a destination address.

For MPLS LSP, we have LDP and RSVP-TE. Unfortunately, LDP and RSVP-TE have inconsistencies in vendor implementations, and RSVP-TE requires a full mesh of TE tunnels. Is this good enough, or can SDN tools enhance and augment existing monitoring? Juniper NorthStar central controller offers friendly end-to-end analytics.

 

Transport SDN: Traffic Engineering

The real problem comes with TE. IP routing is destination-based, and path computation is based on an additive metric. Bandwidth availability is not taken into account. Some links may be congested, and others underutilized. By default, the routing protocol has no way of knowing this. The main traditional approaches to TE are MPLS TE and IGP Metric-based TE.

Varying the metric link moves the problem around. However, you can tweak metrics to enable ECMP, spreading traffic via a hash algorithm over-dispersed paths. ECMP suits local path diversity, but we still lack global visibility for optimum end-to-end TE. A centralized control improves the distribution-control insufficiency needed for optimal path computation for Multi-area/Multi-AS TE.transport SDN

 

BGP-LS & PCEP

OpenDaylight is an SDN infrastructure controller that enhances the control plane, offering a service abstraction layer. It carries out network abstraction of whatever service exists on the controller. Then on top of that, there are APIs enabling applications to interface with the network. Its supports BGP-LS and PCEP, two protocols commonly used in the transport SDN framework.

 

BGP-LS makes BGP an extraction protocol.

The challenge is that the contents of a Link State Database (LSDB) and an IGP’s Traffic Engineering Database (TED) describe only the links and nodes within that domain. When there is a requirement for end-to-end TE capabilities through a multi-domain and multi-protocol architecture, TE applications require visibility outside one area to make better decisions. New tools like BGP-LS and PCEP combined with a central controller enhance TE and provide multi-domain visibility.

We can improve the IGP topology by extending BGP to BGP Link-State. This wraps up the LSDB in BGP transport and pushes it to BGP speakers. It’s a valuable extension used to introduce link-state into BGP. Vendors introduced PCEP in 2005 to solve the TE problem.

Initially, it was stateless, but now available in a stateful mode. PCEP address path computation is multi-domain and multi-layer networks.

Its main driver was to decrease the complexity around MPLS and GMPLS traffic engineering. However, the constrained shortest path (CSPF) process was insufficient in complex typologies. In addition, Dijkstra-based link-state routing protocols suffer from what is known as bin-packing, where they don’t take into consideration network utilization as a whole.

 

Conclusion:

Transport SDN is transforming how networks are designed, operated, and managed. Its ability to improve network efficiency, enhance agility, and increase scalability makes it a key enabler for next-generation networks. As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and the demands for high-performance, flexible networks grow, Transport SDN will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of network infrastructure.