CHIEF: Controller Farm for Clouds of Software-Defined Community Networks

CHIEF is a cloud-based inter-cloud federation framework designed for Software-Defined Community Networks (SDCN).

• Decentralized Inter-Cloud Federation: Loose coupling of community network controllers.
• OpenDaylight Integration: Built on the MD-SAL architecture.
• Messaging4Transport Support: Automatic Northbound binding for MD-SAL using AMQP/JMS.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Schema-agnostic notification forwarding and RPC proxying.
• Network Traffic Monitoring: Real-time stats query via ODL Statistics Manager (Section IV-A).
• Hadoop-Based Billing: Metering and billing service with HDFS integration (Section IV-B).
• Multi-Tenancy & Throttling: Support for virtual partitioning and rate-limited inter-cloud traffic.

CHIEF leverages Messaging4Transport to achieve loose coupling between federated clouds.

1. CHIEF Provider: Listens for resource requests and orchestrates inter-cloud cycles.
2. Inter-Cloud Orchestrator: Routes events by publishing MD-SAL notifications.
3. Monitoring & Billing: Independent bundles for traffic analysis and Hadoop-based metering.
4. Messaging4Transport: Automatically intercepts these notifications and forwards them to a shared AMQP broker.

• Java 8
• Apache Maven 3.3.9+
• OpenDaylight (Helium/Lithium/Beryllium recommended)
• Apache ActiveMQ (for AMQP 1.0 broker)
• Hadoop/HDFS (for Billing service parallel processing)

For detailed setup instructions and troubleshooting, see the User Guide.

A single script handles everything — prerequisites check, Docker infrastructure (Hadoop + ActiveMQ), Maven build, and OpenDaylight download/configuration.

# Full setup
./setup.sh

After the script finishes, start OpenDaylight and install the CHIEF features:

# Source environment (Java 8)
source ./env.sh

# Start Karaf
./distribution-karaf-0.3.4-Lithium-SR4/bin/karaf

# Inside the Karaf console
feature:repo-add mvn:org.opendaylight.chief/chief-features/1.0-SNAPSHOT/xml/features
feature:install odl-chief-all

Generated automatically by setup.sh at <karaf>/etc/org.opendaylight.messaging4transport.cfg:

brokerUrl=tcp://localhost:61616
username=admin
password=admin

<chief-config xmlns="urn:opendaylight:params:xml:ns:yang:chief">
    <controller-id>chief-node-1</controller-id>
    <broker-url>tcp://localhost:61616</broker-url>
</chief-config>

hdfs.url=hdfs://localhost:9000

If you use CHIEF in your research, please cite the below paper:

• Kathiravelu, P. and Veiga, L., 2016, April. CHIEF: controller farm for clouds of software-defined community networks. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering Workshop (IC2EW) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.