How ONOS Powered the IETF Hackathon: Open‑Source SDN Meets IETF Standards

IETF Hackathon Overview

On July 16‑17, the IETF Hackathon was held at the InterContinental Hotel in Berlin, gathering more than 150 developers and standards experts from operators, equipment vendors, and research institutions such as SKT, Telefonica, China Mobile, Cisco, Huawei, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and MIT. Over 30 participants worked on ONOS‑related projects, receiving technical support from ONOS and Huawei experts and connecting to Huawei’s remote lab network.

Day 1 – Opening

Participants arrived from various operators and standards bodies. IETF Chair Jari Arkko opened the event, emphasizing the importance of runnable code for validating standards, discovering gaps, and driving standard improvements.

Day 1 & Day 2 – Competition

Developers familiarized themselves with the programming environment, exchanged technical ideas, and implemented north‑ and south‑bound interfaces according to IETF SDN architecture. Discussions covered both coding solutions and draft protocol improvements. Huawei’s SDN remote lab enabled seamless network connectivity without on‑site hardware, allowing participants to reserve and use a virtual network for topology collection, service deployment, and traffic testing.

Day 2 – Sharing

ONOS, a carrier‑grade open‑source SDN controller, demonstrated four IETF draft functionalities:

ACTN (Abstraction and Control of TE Networks)

BGP‑LS / BGP Flowspec extensions

PCECC (PCE as Central Controller)

YANG Metadata Annotation Extension

Technical Scenarios

ACTN

The team developed a new north‑bound API to help geographically distributed data centers select optimal endpoints and built a network survivability tool using YANG models to analyze the network, issue link warnings, and improve operational efficiency. The hierarchical controller architecture enables cross‑domain, multi‑vendor solutions.

BGP‑LS / BGP Flowspec

The south‑bound development added BGP FlowSpec download to FIB and BGP‑LS SR extensions on ONOS, enabling interoperability with existing network equipment and accelerating SDN deployment through mature BGP mechanisms.

PCECC

Using an ONOS south‑bound plugin, the team implemented efficient LSP label synchronization with an incremental database version, avoiding full database sync. PCECC centralizes path computation based on network topology, improving agility and scalability.

YANG Metadata Annotation Extension

The team created sample implementations of the draft, highlighting YANG’s role as the primary modeling language for SDN controller interfaces. The extension adds metadata annotations to YANG models, enabling automatic, cross‑platform code generation and improving development efficiency.

Awards

The ONOS team received three top honors: Best Progress in Hackathon, Best Feedback to Working Group, and Most Important to IETF.

About ONOS

ONOS is an open‑source SDN operating system designed for carrier‑grade reliability, high performance, and flexibility. Its ecosystem includes the ON.Lab community and more than 60 global operators and vendors such as AT&T, Verizon, NTT, SK Telecom, China Unicom, Nokia, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, and NEC. ONOS is a Linux Foundation project, fostering collaboration across open‑source initiatives.