Introduction

The nmeta (pronounced en-meta) project is founded on the belief that innovation in networks requires a foundation layer of knowledge about both the participants and their types of conversation.

Today, networks generally have only a limited view of participants and conversation types

../_images/nmeta_concept.png

The goal of the nmeta project is to produce network metadata enriched with participant identities and conversation types to provide a foundation for innovation in networking.

The production of enriched network metadata requires policy-based control, and ability to adapt to new purposes through extensibility.

Enriched network metadata has a number of uses, including classifying flows for QoS, billing, traffic engineering, troubleshooting and security.

Nmeta is a research platform for traffic classification on Software Defined Networking (SDN). It runs on top of the Ryu SDN controller (see: http://osrg.github.io/ryu/).

How it Works

Nmeta uses OpenFlow Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to selectively control flows through switches so that packets can be classified and actions taken. It instructs connected OpenFlow switches to send packets from unknown flows to the Ryu SDN Controller, on which nmeta runs, for analysis.

../_images/nmeta_logical_core.png

Nmeta configures a single flow table per switch with a table-miss flow entry (FE) that sends full unmatched packets to the controller. As flows are classified, specific higher-priority FEs are configured to suppress sending further packets to the controller.

Limitations

Nmeta does not scale well. Every new flow has a processing overhead, and this workload cannot be scaled horizontally on the controller. The nmeta2 system is being developed to address this limitation.

Nmeta has no security, it was written to demonstrate SDN functionality and has omitted addressing security requirements. A future rewrite may address security, but for now there is no security whatsoever.

Feature Enhancement Wishlist

See Issues for list of enhancements and bugs

Privacy Considerations

Collecting network metadata brings with it ethical and legal considerations around privacy. Please ensure that you have permission to monitor traffic before deploying this software.

Disclaimer

This code carries no warrantee whatsoever. Use at your own risk.

How to Contribute

Code contributions and suggestions are welcome. Enhancement or bug fixes can be raised as issues through GitHub.

Please get in touch if you want to be added as a contributor to the project:

Email: Nmeta Maintainer