-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 41
Use cases
OpenOverlayRouter (OOR) allows users to easily deploy programmable overlay networks. This enables several interesting use cases. Here we summarize the most relevant ones based on the feedback we get from the community. If you are using OOR for something not covered in this section, we'll be happy to hear about that!
-
Software Defined Networking: The easiness of deployment and the capacity to be remotely programmed make OOR a valuable choice to serve as the data-plane for SDN networks. It allows bypassing the constrains of the physical underlying network to program policies directly in the instantiated overlay. Therefore, it enables flexible over-the-top solutions that reduce deployment complexity, costs and time. Moreover, due to its multi-platform support it can be used to offer a homogeneous control of the network despite the heterogeneous physical network beneath. Note that OOR is agnostic to the underlying networking equipment, which means that SDN networks enabled by OOR can be deployed both on top of SDN-aware hardware or over non-SDN legacy appliances. OOR support for home routers and mobile nodes, enables OOR to effectively achieve SDN deployments at the edge.
-
Service Function Chaining: OOR can be used out-of-the-box as the data-plane for SFC. It can process and forward traffic with different encapsulations, including those used for network services metadata. OOR nodes can be deployed at the edges of the Service Function path as well as hops within the path. On the other hand, OOR leverages on the LISP protocol which can be used as the control-plane protocol to resolve SFC mappings. Support for NSH headers is on the roadmap.
-
Dynamic VPN provisioning: OOR allows connecting remote sites over transit networks using different encapsulation technologies and dynamically managing these connections remotely. Security and encryption can be handled directly by OOR or can offloaded to a third party solution depending on the requirements of the deployment. OOR allows balancing of the tunnelled traffic and transparent migration of connections.
-
Easy home multihoming: Some users are deploying a simple multihoming solution based on OOR and two DSL access. They instantiate an overlay at home by means of getting an IP prefix from the public LISP beta-network and getting underlay connectivity from two different Internet providers. They then deploy an OOR box operating as a router connected to both DSL lines. This allows them to get home-level multihoming, in an active-active setup, with traffic balancing among the lines, and bandwidth aggregation.
-
IPv6 transition: Since OOR has support for multiple address families, it can encapsulate IP-in-IP regardless of the IP version. There are users from the community that have reported successful usage of OOR on different IPv6 transition scenarios. For instance, some of them are using it to get native IPv6 connectivity over IPv4 only providers. Others are using it as a way to easily keep a static, provider-independent, IPv6 address regardless of where they are connecting from.