Operator workflows

Workflow is a term that spilled from the SEBA Reference Design (RD) into VOLTHA.

In SEBA a workflow is defined as the set of operations that control the lifecycle of a subscriber, authentication logic, customer tag management etc… Such workflow is operator specific.

A full description of the workflows can be found here.

A big part of the workflow in SEBA is defined within NEM (Network Edge Mediator). Given that NEM is not available in a plain VOLTHA deployment the definition of workflow is a subset of the SEBA one, and comprises:

  • Customer tags allocation

  • Technology profile

  • Bandwidth profile

  • Flow management (EAPOL/DHCP/Data path)

  • Group management

The workflows are often referred to as use-cases and the two words are interchangeable in the VOLTHA environment.

To deploy a specific workflow through kind-voltha please visit Quickstart.

How is the workflow defined in VOLTHA?

Customer tag allocation

The vlan tags for a particular subscriber are defined in the sadis configuration. Sadis stands for Subscriber and Device Information Service and is the ONOS application responsible to store and distribute Subscriber information.

Information on different sadis configurations can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JLQ51CZg4jsXsBQcrJn-fc2kVvXH6lw0PYoyIclwmBs

Technology profile

Technology profiles describes technology specific attributes required to implement Subscriber Services on an OpenFlow managed Logical Switch overlaid upon an OLT or other technology specific platform.

More on Technology profiles here: https://wiki.opencord.org/display/CORD/Technology+Profiles#TechnologyProfiles-IntroductiontoTechnologyProfiles

Technology profiles in VOLTHA are stored in ETCD. If you want to load a custom Technology profile in your stack you can do so by:

ETCD_POD=$(kubectl get pods | grep etcd | awk 'NR==1{print \$1}')
kubectl cp <my-tech-profile>.json $ETCD_POD:/tmp/tp.json
kubectl exec -it $ETCD_POD -- /bin/sh -c 'cat /tmp/tp.json | ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl put service/voltha/technology_profiles/XGS-PON/64'

Note that `XGS-PON` represents the technology of your OLT device and `64` is the default id of the technology profile. If you want to use a technology profile that is not the default for a particular subscriber that needs to be configured in `sadis`.

Bandwidth profile

Bandwidth profiles control the allocation Bandwidth for a particular subscriber. They are defined in the sadis. An example:

{
  "id" : "Default",
  "cir" : 1000000,
  "cbs" : 1001,
  "eir" : 1002,
  "ebs" : 1003,
  "air" : 1004
}

Each bandwidth profile is then translated into an OpenFlow Meter for configuration on the OLT.

Flow management

Flows are managed in ONOS by the olt application. Through the configuration of this application you can define whether your setup will create:

  • An EAPOL trap flow

  • A DHCP trap flow

  • An IGMP trap flow

in addition to the default data plane flows.

Group management

Groups are managed in ONOS by the mcast application. Through the configuration of this application you can achieve multicast for services such as IpTV.