MaxiNet: Distributed Emulation of Software-Defined Networks - Wette, Philip; Dräxler, Martin; Schwabe, Arne; Wallaschek, Felix; Zahraee, Mohammad Hassan; Karl, Holger; SFB 901; SFB 901 - Subprojekt A2; SFB 901 - Project Area A (Proceedings of the 2014 IFIP Networking Conference (Networking 2014), 2014)
Network emulations are widely used for testing novel network protocols and routing algorithms in realistic scenarios. Up to now, there is no emulation tool that is able to emulate large software-deﬁned data center networks that consist of several thousand nodes. Mininet is the most common tool to emulate Software-Deﬁned Networks of several hundred nodes. We extend Mininet to span an emulated network over several physical machines, making it possible to emulate networks of several thousand nodes on just a handful of physical machines. This enables us to emulate, e.g., large data center networks. To test this approach, we additionally introduce a trafﬁc generator for data center trafﬁc. Since there are no data center trafﬁc traces publicly available we use the results of two recent trafﬁc studies to create synthetic trafﬁc. We show the design and discuss some challenges we had in building our trafﬁc generator. As a showcase for our work we emulated a data center consisting of 3200 hosts on a cluster of only 12 physical machines. We show the resulting workloads and the trade-offs involved.
Keywords: conference paper