Static Flow Pusher API pre-v1.0

What is Static Flow Pusher?

This documentation is for all Floodlight versions pre-v1.0, such as v0.9 and v0.91. If you haven't already, please consider upgrading to Floodlight v1.0, which has separate documentation here.

Static Flow Pusher is a Floodlight module, exposed via REST API, that allows a user to manually insert flows into an OpenFlow network.

Proactive vs Reactive Flow Insertion

OpenFlow supports two methods of flow insertion: proactive and reactive. Reactive flow insertion occurs when a packet reaches an OpenFlow switch without a matching flow. The packet is sent to the controller, which evaluates it, adds the appropriate flows, and lets the switch continue its forwarding. Alternatively, flows can be inserted proactively by the controller in switches before packets arrive.

Floodlight supports both mechanisms of flow insertion. Static Flow Pusher is generally useful for proactive flow insertion.

Note that by default, Floodlight loads the Forwarding module which does reactive flow pushing. If you would like to exclusively use static flows, you must remove Forwarding from the floodlight.properties file.

How to Use It?

API Summary

URI	Description	Arguments
/wm/staticflowentrypusher/json	Add/Delete static flow	HTTP POST data (add flow), HTTP DELETE (for deletion)
/wm/staticflowentrypusher/list/<switch>/json	List static flows for a switch or all switches	switch: Valid Switch DPID (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX) or "all"
/wm/staticflowentrypusher/clear/<switch>/json	Clear static flows for a switch or all switches	switch: Valid Switch DPID (XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX) or "all"

Adding a static flow

Static Flow Pusher is accessible via a REST api so there are multiple ways to access it. For example, to insert a flow on switch 1 that takes packets from port 1 and outputs them on port 2, you can simply use a curl command. The second command will dump the flow so you can see it set.

curl -d '{"switch": "00:00:00:00:00:00:00:01", "name":"flow-mod-1", "priority":"32768", "ingress-port":"1","active":"true", "actions":"output=2"}' http://<controller_ip>:8080/wm/staticflowentrypusher/json

curl http://<controller_ip>:8080/wm/core/switch/1/flow/json;

Deleting a static flow

To delete a static flow you send an HTTP DELETE that includes the name of the flow.

curl -X DELETE -d '{"name":"flow-mod-1"}' http://<controller_ip>:8080/wm/staticflowentrypusher/json

Possible properties of a flow entry:

Key	Value	Notes
switch	<switch ID>	ID of the switch (data path) that this rule should be added to xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
name	<string>	Name of the flow entry, this is the primary key, it MUST be unique
actions	<key>=<value>	See table of actions below Specify multiple actions using a comma-separated list Specifying no actions will cause the packets to be dropped
priority	<number>	default is 32767 maximum value is 32767
active	<boolean>
wildcards
ingress-port	<number>	switch port on which the packet is received Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
src-mac	<mac address>	xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
dst-mac	<mac address>	xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
vlan-id	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
vlan-priority	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
ether-type	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
tos-bits	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
protocol	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
src-ip	<ip address>	xx.xx.xx.xx
dst-ip	<ip address>	xx.xx.xx.xx
src-port	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
dst-port	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal

Possible actions within the "action" field:

Key	Value	Notes
output	<number> all controller local ingress-port normal flood	no "drop" option (instead, specify no action to drop packets)
enqueue	<number>:<number>	First number is port number, second is queue ID Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
strip-vlan
set-vlan-id	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
set-vlan-priority	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
set-src-mac	<mac address>	xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
set-dst-mac	<mac address>	xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
set-tos-bits	<number>
set-src-ip	<ip address>	xx.xx.xx.xx
set-dst-ip	<ip address>	xx.xx.xx.xx
set-src-port	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal
set-dst-port	<number>	Can be hexadecimal (with leading 0x) or decimal

Using Static Flow Pusher in Practice

Static Flow Pusher can we scripted using simple python code to control a network. As an example, set up a simple network in a mininet vm after starting the floodlight controller. The default topology is one switch (s1) and two hosts connected to it (h2 and h3).

sudo mn --controller=remote --ip=<controller ip> --port=6633

The code below will insert a flow from h2 to h3 and one from h3 to h2.

import httplib
import json

class StaticFlowPusher(object):

    def __init__(self, server):
        self.server = server

    def get(self, data):
        ret = self.rest_call({}, 'GET')
        return json.loads(ret[2])

    def set(self, data):
        ret = self.rest_call(data, 'POST')
        return ret[0] == 200

    def remove(self, objtype, data):
        ret = self.rest_call(data, 'DELETE')
        return ret[0] == 200

    def rest_call(self, data, action):
        path = '/wm/staticflowentrypusher/json'
        headers = {
            'Content-type': 'application/json',
            'Accept': 'application/json',
            }
        body = json.dumps(data)
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(self.server, 8080)
        conn.request(action, path, body, headers)
        response = conn.getresponse()
        ret = (response.status, response.reason, response.read())
        print ret
        conn.close()
        return ret

pusher = StaticFlowPusher('<insert_controller_ip')

flow1 = {
    'switch':"00:00:00:00:00:00:00:01",
    "name":"flow-mod-1",
    "cookie":"0",
    "priority":"32768",
    "ingress-port":"1",
    "active":"true",
    "actions":"output=flood"
    }

flow2 =	{
    'switch':"00:00:00:00:00:00:00:01",
    "name":"flow-mod-2",
    "cookie":"0",
    "priority":"32768",
    "ingress-port":"2",
    "active":"true",
    "actions":"output=flood"
    }

pusher.set(flow1)
pusher.set(flow2)

To test this out, run a pingtest in the mininet vm (note: you may want to disable the learning switch and other routing code in advance to make sure your static flows are taken).

 mininet> h2 ping h3