Openflow flow table – H3C Technologies H3C S5120 Series Switches User Manual

Page 9

Advertising
background image

3

Logical port—Does not correspond to a hardware interface of a switch and might be defined by

non-OpenFlow methods. A logical port can be either an ingress port or an output port.

Reserved port—Defined by OpenFlow to specify forwarding actions. Reserved ports include the
following types:

{

All—All OpenFlow ports that can be used to forward a packet.

{

Controller—OpenFlow controller.

{

Table—Flow table.

{

In_Port—Packet ingress port.

{

Any—Generic port description. The port cannot be used as an ingress port or output port.

{

Local—Local CPU.

{

Normal—Normal forwarding process.

{

Flood—Flooding.

Except the Any type, all reserved ports can be used only as output ports.

OpenFlow flow table

An OpenFlow switch matches packets against one or more user-defined flow tables. A flow table consists

of flow entries, and packets are matched based on the matching precedence of flow entries.

Figure 2 Components of a flow entry

A flow entry contains the following fields:

Match fields—Matching rules of the flow entry. These consist of the ingress port, packet headers,
and metadata specified by the previous table.

Priority—Matching precedence of the flow entry. A packet is matched against the table and only
the highest priority flow entry that matches the packet is selected.

Counters—Counts of the packets that match the flow entry.

Instructions—To modify the action set or pipeline processing. These include the following types:

{

Meter—Directs the packets to the specified meter to limit the rate of the packets.

{

Apply-Actions—Applies the specified actions in the action list immediately.

{

Clear-Actions—Clears all the actions in the action set immediately.

{

Write-Actions—Modifies all the actions in the action set immediately.

{

Write-Metadata—Modifies packets between two flow tables if there are multiple flow tables.

{

Goto-Table—Indicates the next flow table in the processing line.

Actions are executed in one of the following ways:

{

Action Set—When the instruction set of a flow entry does not contain a Goto-Table instruction,
pipeline processing stops and the actions in the action set are executed. An action set contains

a maximum of one action of each type.

{

Action List—The actions in the action list are executed immediately in the order specified by the
action list. The effect of those actions is cumulative.

Timeouts—Maximum amount of idle time or hard time for the flow entry.

{

Idle Time—The flow entry is removed when it has matched no packets during the idle time.

Advertising