The Current State of SDN Protocols
The Current State of SDN Protocols
by Hariharan Ananthakrishnan, Distinguished Engineer - October 14, 2014
In last week’s blog post I started outlining the various standards needed to make SDN a reality. Here is more detail about the relevant protocols and the IETF’s progress on each one.
OpenFlow has emerged as a Layer 2 software defined networking (SDN) southbound protocol. Similarly, Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP), BGP Link State Distribution (BGP-LS), and NetConf/YANG are becoming the de-facto SDN southbound protocols for Layer 3. The problem is that these protocols are stuck in various draft forms that are not interoperable, which limits the industry’s SDN progress.
Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP)
PCEP is used for communicating Label Switched Paths (LSPs) between a Path Computation Client (PCC) and a Path Computation Element (PCE). PCEP has been in use since 2006. The stateful [draft-ietf-pce-stateful-pce] and PCE-initiated LSP [draft-ietf-pce-pce-initiated-lsp] extensions were added more recently and enable PCEP use for SDN deployments. The IETF drafts for both extensions have not yet advanced to “Proposed Standard” status after more than two years.
Because the drafts went through many significant revisions, vendors are struggling to keep up with the Continue reading