Soft Patch Panel¶
Overview¶
Soft Patch Panel (SPP) is a DPDK application for providing switching functionality for Service Function Chaining in NFV (Network Function Virtualization).
With SPP, user is able to configure network easily and dynamically via simple patch panel like interface.
The goal of SPP is to easily interconnect DPDK applications together, and assign resources dynamically to these applications to build a pipeline.
Design¶
SPP is composed of a primary DPDK application that is responsible for resource management. This primary application doesn’t interact with any traffic, and is used to manage creation and freeing of resources only.
A Python based management interface, SPP controller, is provided to control the primary DPDK application to create resources, which are then to be used by secondary applications. This management application provides a socket based interface for the primary and secondary DPDK applications to interface to the manager.