SoftFIRE Middleware
SoftFIRE architecture¶
The SoftFIRE Middleware is the central software logic of the SoftFIRE platform. It exposes a ReST api that are consumed by a CLI or a Dashboard. The Experimenter can use one of these two tools for interacting with the SoftFIRE platform. The southbound interface is directed to the testbeds. Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Ericsson, University of Surrey and Assembly Data System.
The SoftFIRE Middleware¶
The central core logic of the SoftFIRE platform is the SoftFIRE Middleware. The SoftFIRE Middleware is composed by multiple managers, each of them is in charge of a specific kind of resource.
- SDN Manager manages SDN resources
- Security Manager for the Security resources
- NFV Manager is in charge of providing NFV functionalities to the middleware
- Monitoring manager provides experimenter monitoring resource access
- Physical Device Manager handles the access to the physical resources
The main component of the infrastructure is the Experimenter Manager (EM). Other managers register to the EM, so the EM is able to redirect the request coming from the Experimenter to the correct specific manager depending on the kind of resource requested. Its main features include:
- Resource discovery
- Understand the experiment definition
- Resource reservation
- Resource provisioning
- Provide Experiment Monitoring
- User Authentication
- User Authorization
The protocol in between the managers is gRPC. For that reason each manager can be implemented in any language that supports gRPC.
Interactions¶
The following image is only for personal knowledge, it is not relevant for the execution of the experiment. The figure defines the high level interactions between the experimenter, the Experiment Manager and the other Managers, through a sequence diagrams.
