When configuring SOS, all the switches – whether hardware or software – must be connected to a central Floodlight controller. This controller is equipped with an SOS module that communicates with the four switches and with the SOS agents themselves. The following is a general guide to configure the SOS controller.
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- Prior to setting up the controller, consider how you are going to connect each switch to it. The control plane needs to be reliable and accessible to both the switches and the controller itself. A common solution is to host the controller on a public IP using a GENI VM. This will work in most all cases – just point each switch to this public controller IP. An alternative is to use port forwarding on a known and accessible public IP to forward all OpenFlow control plane traffic to the real location of the controller.
- The controller, although relatively stable, is still under development. In between SOS runs/trials/tests, it is recommended you restart the controller. Please reach out and ask (rizard@g.clemson.edu) if you feel something isn't working right.
- At present, the controller does not take into account the capabilities of any hardware switch. As such, flow matches and actions might need to be tweaked in order to ensure use of the switch hardware forwarding path. Conveying this information in a dynamic way is a known problem across the board in OpenFlow and still does not have a foolproof solution. OpenFlow 1.3 introduced table features messages, which allows the switch to inform the controller about most of the capabilities and requirements of each of its flow tables. This feature was recently introduced to Floodlight in late spring 2015 and to OVS around the same time. It has not been extended to SOS yet.
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