allow meta-flowspace (was Dynamically Changing Flowspaces)

[billsnow]

Status: Open Project: Flowvisor Component/s: Core Affects Version/s: 0.7.2 Fix Version/s: Long Term

Type: New Feature Priority: Major Reporter: Nick Bastin Assignee: Rob Sherwood Resolution: Unresolved Votes: 0 Labels: None Remaining Estimate: Not Specified Time Spent: Not Specified Original Estimate: Not Specified

Description
There are scenarios where a static slice definition is not sufficient.

1. "All the traffic on a wireless network" : (think of a home setup with a single uplink). It's easy to delegate the wireless port that represents the SSID, but how do you split the downlink? A workaround solution is to have an external read-only controller that learns mac-address from the wireless network, and updates the slice with the reverse flowspace.
2. "All the traffic to/from netflix.com" : It's not possible to get a predefined list of IP addresses for a url like netflix or youtube. What we would like to have is some sort of caching in the FV to resolve the requests and slice accordingly. For both cases, an external controller might be able to help a bit (at least for the first, plausible for the second as well). But performance and absolute isolation is questionable (one may receive a few unintended packets until policy enforcement takes place)

Comments
Comment by Rob Sherwood [ 04/Jul/11 ] updated the name of the ticket to "meta"-flowspace because I think that's clearer. One can already dynamically change the flowspace, just not inline as Yiannis/KK would like. I believe this is a great use-case for load-able modules in the FV.

Original issue: https://openflow.stanford.edu/bugs/browse/FLOWVISOR-21