SD-Fabric Tutorial

Welcome to the SD-Fabric tutorial!

SD-Fabric is an open source programmable network fabric tailored for 5G-connected edge clouds, with a focus on enterprise and Industry 4.0 use cases.

This repository contains instructions to learn how to use and develop SD-Fabric. Before starting, we suggest familiarizing with the SD-Fabric architecture and features using the official SD-Fabric documentation website at https://docs.sd-fabric.org.

In this tutorial, we provide scripts to easily bring up an SD-Fabric environment in a laptop (or server), including ONOS, emulated Stratum switches, and other SD-Fabric components. We also provide hands-on exercises that show how to set up SD-Fabric, use advanced features like the 5G P4-UPF, In-band Network Telemetry, and more.

System requirements

All exercises can be executed by installing the following dependencies:

• Docker v1.13.0+ (with docker-compose)
• make
• Python 3
• Bash-like Unix shell
• Wireshark (optional)

We recommend running the exercises on a machine with at least 4 GB of RAM and 4 core CPU. For a smooth experience, we recommend running on a system that has at least the double of resources.

Note for macOS users: if you are using Docker Desktop for Mac, make sure to adjust the CPU and memory assignments for your Docker VM. We don't support M1 Mac yet since there is a known connectivity issue.

Note for Windows users: all scripts have been tested on macOS and Ubuntu. Although we think they should work on Windows, we have not tested it.

Get this repo and download dependencies

To work on the exercises you will need to clone this repo and download dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/sdfabric-tutorial
cd sdfabric-tutorial
make deps

The last command will download all necessary Docker images allowing you to work off-line. If you are doing this tutorial at an event, we recommend running this step ahead of the tutorial, with a reliable Internet connection.

Repo structure

This repo is structured as follows:

• config/ Configuration files for various sub-components
• mininet/ Mininet script to emulate a 2x2 leaf-spine fabric topology of stratum_bmv2 devices
• solution/ Solutions for the exercises
• util/ Utility scripts

Tutorial commands

To facilitate working on the exercises, we provide a set of make-based commands to control the different aspects of the tutorial. Commands will be introduced in the exercises, here's a quick reference:

Make command	Description
make deps	Pull and build all required dependencies
make start	Start Mininet and ONOS containers
make start-upf	Start PFCP Agent and other UPF containers
make stop	Stop all containers
make restart	Restart containers clearing any previous state
make reset	Reset the tutorial environment
make onos-cli	Access the ONOS CLI (password: rocks, Ctrl-D to exit)
make onos-log	Show the ONOS log
make mn-cli	Access the Mininet CLI (Ctrl-D to exit)
make mn-log	Show the Mininet log (i.e., the CLI output)
make mn-pcap	Dump packet on a particular Mininet host
make netcfg	Push netcfg.json file (network config) to ONOS

Exercises

Click on the exercise name to see the instructions:

1. Basic configuration
2. P4-UPF

We plan to add more exercises in the future. Make sure to watch this repo to be informed of any update. Planned additions:

• In-band Network Telemetry (INT)
• Extending SD-Fabric
• Slicing & QoS
• Advanced Connectivity

Solutions

You can find solutions for each exercise in the solution directory. Feel free to compare your solution to the reference one whenever you feel stuck.