Mininet on steroids: exploiting the cloud for Mininet performance

Abstract

Networks have become complex systems that combine various concepts, techniques, and technologies. As a consequence, modelling or simulating them is now extremely complicated and researchers massively resort to prototyping techniques. Among other tools, Mininet is the most popular when it comes to evaluate SDN propositions. It allows to emulate SDN networks on a single computer. However, under certain circumstances experiments (e.g., resource intensive ones) may overload the host running Mininet. To tackle this issue, we propose Distrinet, a way to distribute Mininet over multiple hosts. Distrinet uses the same API than Mininet, meaning that it is compatible with Mininet programs. Distrinet is generic and can deploy experiments in Linux clusters or in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Thanks to optimization techniques, Distrinet minimizes the number of hosts required to perform an experiment given the capabilities of the hosting infrastructure, meaning that the experiment is run in a single host (as Mininet) if possible. Otherwise, it is automatically deployed on a platform using a minimum amount of resources in a Linux cluster or with a minimum cost in Amazon EC2.

Distrinet

“…In this paper, we present Distrinet [2], an extension of Mininet implemented to allow distributed Mininet experiments to leverage resources of multiple machines when needed.…”

A Right Placement Makes a Happy Emulator: a Placement Module for Distributed SDN/NFV Emulation

“…Using a single machine for a rapid emulation prevents resource intensive experiments, e.g., needing heavy memory, processing, input/output, or specific hardware, to emulate, for instance, networks with virtual network functions or artificial intelligence algorithms. To tackle this issue, distributed emulation tools were proposed: Maxinet [1], Mininet Cluster Edition [2], and Distrinet [3].…”