OpenDaylight Magnesium is the 12th release of the most widely deployed open source SDN controller platform. The release includes two new projects, new features that help with service provider use cases, cross-project collaboration, and improvements in S3P (stability, security, scalability, performance). The new projects DetNet and Plastic deal with deterministic networking for performance sensitive traffic and model-to-model translations respectively. The community contributed several new features to the TransportPCE and BGPCEP projects making OpenDaylight even better suited to service provider use cases. OpenDaylight also provides an optimized distribution of the Magnesium release to the ONAP project so it can be consumed efficiently by a number of ONAP controllers. Magnesium includes a JDK 11 that brings with it a number of security features such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, newer ciphers, key agreement improvements, and root certificate additions.
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Cross-Project Collaboration
The OpenDaylight community continued its tight collaboration with the ONAP community by providing an optimized distribution of the Magnesium release specifically tailored for ONAP. This distribution is being integrated successfully by the ONAP Common Controller Software Development Kit (CCSDP) project and will be available in the upcoming ONAP Frankfurt release. Since the OpenDaylight distribution is optimized, it only includes the software components required by ONAP thus reducing the code footprint and improving security.
Best-in-Class Functionality for Service Provider SDN Use Cases
The Magnesium release has important feature enhancements to the Transport Path Calculation Engine (Transport PCE) and BGPCEP projects. Both sets of enhancements are important for service provider use cases.
- TransportPCE took a major step forward in the control of open optical infrastructure domains. It is the culmination of work done in previous releases focusing on an OpenROADM based Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) layer and experimental support for Optical Transport Networking (OTN). An experimental inventory feature is also introduced for OpenROADM 1.2.1 devices.
- BGPCEP supports WAN connectivity. In the Magnesium release, BGPCEP has added support for missing features from RFC 5440 such as PCRequest/PCReply, topology graph, and TED path computation algorithms. The community also contributed a feature to add BGP-LS topology provider support for segment routing.
In addition to these two major areas of enhancements, the Genius project, that provides generic network interfaces, utilities, and services, added support for Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for OpenFlow tunnels. This makes it easier to detect if the tunnel is bidirectional or not.
New Projects
DetNet: DetNet, the Deterministic Networking project is intended to be used in environments where guaranteed bandwidth, bounded latency, and other properties are required for time sensitive data. DetNet includes a number of Layer3 deterministic networking and Layer2 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) techniques. Architecturally, DetNet applications communicate with MD-SAL over RESTCONF API and the southbound DetNet controller enables MD-SAL to obtain topology information about DetNet bridges and to subsequently configure them by using the NETCONF protocol. The Magnesium release includes the first version of DetNet with time sync support for TSN, topology discovery for DetNet bridges, the southbound controller plugin, and features to manage the end-to-end information flow and service configuration, QoS, and optimal path calculation. The seed code and initial contributions were from ZTE.
Plastic: Plastic is a “translation by intent” facility that assists with model-to-model transformations. The model-to-model translation problem is pervasive in writing SDN controller applications, both internally and in supporting microservices. Plastic emphasizes writing translations intended to be as resilient to model changes as possible. The first version of Plastic is available in the Magnesium release. The seed code and initial contributions were from Lumina and the initial release focuses on performance and functionality.
Improved Functionality, Stability, and Scalability
The Magnesium release continued to make progress around S3P (stability, security, scalability, and performance and also usability, documentation, manageability, and resilience). For example, the OpenFlow plugin and the Netvirt project improved cluster stability, scale, and performance. The projects also include updated documentation, upgrade process description, and numerous bug fixes. The Daexin (data export/import) project has improved scalability and supports processing of very large data sets. Projects such as Genius, OVSDB, NETCONF, and AAA include a variety of improvements in the areas of scalability, performance, and bug fixes. Moreover, the Magnesium release includes Java Developer Kit (JDK) 11 that brings with it a number of security features such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, newer ciphers, key agreement improvements, and root certificate additions. Finally the Magnesium release includes a total of 70+ improvements and bug fixes.