Section: New Software and Platforms

Distrinet

Keywords: SDN - Emulation - Large-scale Emulators - Network simulator

Scientific Description: 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. Two experimental techniques are mainly used when it comes to testing a network: simulation and emulation. Emulation provides a good accuracy and allows to test the applications directly in an environment that is similar to a real one. Most of the emulators do not take into account the scalability, because usually they are designed to be executed in a single machine. 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. Unfortunately, Mininet shows its limitations with resource intensive experiments as the emulating host may become overloaded. To tackle this issue, we propose Distrinet, a distributed implementation of Mininet over multiple hosts. Distrinet uses the same API than Mininet, meaning that it is compatible with Mininet programs. It is generic and can deploy experiments in Linux clusters or in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Assessment: A5, SO3, SM2, EM2-down, SDL4

Functional Description: Distrinet is an extension of Mininet that relies on LXC to be distributed in the cloud, and particularly in Amazon.

Release Functional Description: First release

• Participants: Damien Saucez, Giuseppe Di Lena, Andrea Tomassilli, Frédéric Giroire, Thierry Turletti and Walid Dabbous

• Partner: Orange Labs

• Contact: Walid Dabbous

• URL: https://distrinet-emu.github.io