QUANT-NET Control Plane Plugins

Controller plugins extend the built-in functionality of the Quant-Net Control Plane (QNCP). There are currently four plugin types (Routing, Scheduling, Monitoring, and Protocol), each representing common classes of functions involved in quantum networking experiments. This repository is expected to primarily contain plugins of type Protocol.

Each plugin defines both client and server commands for RPC calls, along with the corresponding handlers that the controller must process. Additionally, plugins can define message commands to handle non-RPC messages. When the controller starts, it loads and initializes these plugins, registering the provided commands in its RPC server and client and message server.

The ControllerContextManager provides the running context of the controller to a plugin. The context object includes the current controller configuration, the RPC server/client, and the Message server/client.

An example of how to use plugins to implement message handling can be found in the QNCP documentation.

Installation and Usage

Plugins should be referenced by QNCP Controllers and Agents by setting the appropriate paths in their respective configuration files. Both Controller and Agent configuration files contain plugin and schema path entries.

This plugin repository does not require any independent installation or configuration beyond making the contents accessible to the Controller and Agent processes.

Plugin Layout

The typical filesystem layout for a Protocol Plugin is as follows:

• A named plugin folder under top-level directory.
• A subfolder that contains the Controller plugin definition. Here pingpong, which becomes the name of the loaded plugin in the Controller process.
• An interpreter subfolder that contains the protocol interpreter code for the Agent process.
• Any protocol schema for the plugin placed in a common schema folder.

plugins/
|-- myPingPongPlugin/
|   |-- pingpong/
|   |   |-- __init__.py
|   |   `-- ponger.py
|   `-- interpreter/
|       `-- phandler.py
`-- schema/
    `-- pingpong.yaml