2
OpenFlow supports the following types of ports:
•
Physical port
—Corresponds to a hardware interface of a switch, such as an Ethernet interface. A
physical port can be either an ingress port or an output port.
•
Logical port
—Does not correspond to a hardware interface of a switch and might be defined by
non-OpenFlow methods, such as an aggregate interface. A logical port can be either an ingress
port or an output port.
•
Reserved port
—Defined by OpenFlow to specify forwarding actions. A reserved port can only be
an output port. Reserved ports include the following types:
{
All
—All OpenFlow ports that can be used to forward a packet.
{
Controller
—OpenFlow controller.
{
Local
—Local CPU.
{
In port
—Packet ingress port. This type is available in Release 2311P05 and later versions.
{
Normal
—Normal forwarding process.
{
Flood
—Flooding.
OpenFlow flow table
An OpenFlow switch matches packets against one or more user-defined flow tables. A flow table
contains flow entries, and packets are matched based on the matching precedence of flow entries.
OpenFlow flow tables include the following types:
•
MAC-IP
—Combines the MAC address table and FIB table.
A MAC-IP flow table provides the following match fields:
{
Destination MAC address.
{
VLAN.
{
Destination IP address.
A MAC-IP flow table provides the following actions:
{
Modifying the destination MAC address.
{
Modifying the source MAC address.
{
Modifying the VLAN.
{
Specifying the output port.
•
Extensibility
—Provides more match fields and actions than a MAC-IP flow table, such as destination
MAC address, destination IP address, VLAN priority, TCP source port, and TCP destination port.
Flow entry
Figure 2
Components of a flow entry
A flow entry contains the following fields:
•
Match fields
—Matching rules of the flow entry. These contain 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.