skip to main content
10.1145/2774993.2775012acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescommConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

VT-Mininet: Virtual-time-enabled Mininet for Scalable and Accurate Software-Define Network Emulation

Published: 17 June 2015 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • Abstract

    The advancement of software-defined networking (SDN) technology is highly dependent on the successful transformations from in-house research ideas to real-life products. To enable such transformations, a testbed offering scalable and high fidelity networking environment for testing and evaluating new/existing designs is extremely valuable. Mininet, the most popular SDN emulator by far, is designed to achieve both accuracy and scalability by running unmodified code of network applications in lightweight Linux Containers. However, Mininet cannot guarantee performance fidelity under high workloads, in particular when the number of concurrent active events is more than the number of parallel cores. In this project, we develop a lightweight virtual time system in Linux container and integrate the system with Mininet, so that all the containers have their own virtual clocks rather than using the physical system clock which reflects the serialized execution of multiple containers. With the notion of virtual time, all the containers perceive virtual time as if they run independently and concurrently. As a result, interactions between the containers and the physical system are artificially scaled, making a network appear to be ten times faster from the viewpoint of applications within the containers than it actually is. We also design an adaptive virtual time scheduling subsystem in Mininet, which is responsible to balance the experiment speed and fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that embedding virtual time into Mininet significantly enhances its performance fidelity, and therefore, results in a useful platform for the SDN community to conduct scalable experiments with high fidelity.

    References

    [1]
    iperf3. http://software.es.net/iperf.
    [2]
    Linux containers. https://linuxcontainers.org.
    [3]
    Mininet: An instant virtual network on your laptop (or other PC). http://mininet.org/.
    [4]
    Open vSwitch. http://openvswitch.org.
    [5]
    S3F/S3FNet. https://s3f.iti.illinois.edu/.
    [6]
    M. Erazo, Y. Li, and J. Liu. Sveet! a scalable virtualized evaluation environment for tcp. In Proceedings of the 2009 Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks Communities and Workshops, pages 1-10, 2009.
    [7]
    A. Grau, K. Herrmann, and K. Rothermel. Efficient and scalable network emulation using adaptive virtual time. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, pages 1-6, 2009.
    [8]
    A. Grau, K. Herrmann, and K. Rothermel. Netbalance: Reducing the runtime of network emulation using live migration. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, pages 1-6, 2011.
    [9]
    A. Grau, S. Maier, K. Herrmann, and K. Rothermel. Time jails: A hybrid approach to scalable network emulation. In Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation, pages 7-14, 2008.
    [10]
    D. Gupta, K. V. Vishwanath, M. McNett, A. Vahdat, K. Yocum, A. Snoeren, and G. M. Voelker. Diecast: Testing distributed systems with an accurate scale model. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 29(2):1-48, 2011.
    [11]
    D. Gupta, K. Yocum, M. McNett, A. C. Snoeren, A. Vahdat, and G. M. Voelker. To infinity and beyond: Time warped network emulation. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 1-2, 2005.
    [12]
    N. Handigol, B. Heller, V. Jeyakumar, B. Lantz, and N. McKeown. Reproducible network experiments using container-based emulation. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, pages 253-264, 2012.
    [13]
    T. R. Henderson, M. Lacage, G. F. Riley, C. Dowell, and J. Kopena. Network simulations with the ns-3 simulator. SIGCOMM Demonstration, 15:17, 2008.
    [14]
    D. Jin and D. M. Nicol. Parallel simulation of software defined networks. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation, pages 91-102, 2013.
    [15]
    D. Jin, Y. Zheng, H. Zhu, D. M. Nicol, and L. Winterrowd. Virtual time integration of emulation and parallel simulation. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE/SCS 26th Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation, pages 201-210, 2012.
    [16]
    J. Lamps, D. M. Nicol, and M. Caesar. Timekeeper: A lightweight virtual time system for linux. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSIM/PADS Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation, pages 179-186, 2014.
    [17]
    B. Lantz, B. Heller, and N. McKeown. A network in a laptop: Rapid prototyping for software-defined networks. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, pages 1-6, 2010.
    [18]
    S. Maier, A. Grau, H. Weinschrott, and K. Rothermel. Scalable network emulation: A comparison of virtual routing and virtual machines. In Proceedings of 12th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, pages 395-402, 2007.
    [19]
    N. McKeown, T. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, G. Parulkar, L. Peterson, J. Rexford, S. Shenker, and J. Turner. Openflow: enabling innovation in campus networks. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 38(2):69-74, 2008.
    [20]
    S.-Y. Wang, C.-L. Chou, and C.-M. Yang. Estinet openflow network simulator and emulator. Communications Magazine, IEEE, 51(9):110-117, 2013.
    [21]
    E. Weingärtner, F. Schmidt, H. V. Lehn, T. Heer, and K. Wehrle. Slicetime: A platform for scalable and accurate network emulation. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, pages 253-266, 2011.
    [22]
    Y. Zheng and D. M. Nicol. A virtual time system for openvz-based network emulations. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation, pages 1-10, 2011.

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)Integrating I/O Time to Virtual Time System for High Fidelity Container-based Network EmulationProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531023(37-48)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Temporally synchronized emulation of devices with simulation of networksProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531020(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network EmulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/347886732:2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    Index Terms

    1. VT-Mininet: Virtual-time-enabled Mininet for Scalable and Accurate Software-Define Network Emulation

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Conferences
          SOSR '15: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on Software Defined Networking Research
          June 2015
          226 pages
          ISBN:9781450334518
          DOI:10.1145/2774993
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

          Sponsors

          In-Cooperation

          • USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 17 June 2015

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Author Tags

          1. Mininet
          2. Network Emulation
          3. SDN
          4. Virtual Time

          Qualifiers

          • Short-paper

          Conference

          SOSR 2015
          Sponsor:
          SOSR 2015: ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research
          June 17 - 18, 2015
          California, Santa Clara

          Acceptance Rates

          SOSR '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 43 submissions, 16%;
          Overall Acceptance Rate 7 of 43 submissions, 16%

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • Downloads (Last 12 months)36
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          Cited By

          View all
          • (2022)Integrating I/O Time to Virtual Time System for High Fidelity Container-based Network EmulationProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531023(37-48)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
          • (2022)Temporally synchronized emulation of devices with simulation of networksProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531020(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
          • (2022)Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network EmulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/347886732:2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
          • (2021)Distributed Virtual Time-Based Synchronization for Simulation of Cyber-Physical SystemsACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/344623731:2(1-24)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2021
          • (2021)Intrusion Detection System for Cloud Based Software-Defined NetworksJournal of Physics: Conference Series10.1088/1742-6596/1804/1/0120071804:1(012007)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2021
          • (2020)Adapting TCP for reconfigurable datacenter networksProceedings of the 17th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3388242.3388290(651-666)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2020
          • (2020)Precise Virtual Time Advancement for Network EmulationProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3384441.3395978(175-186)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
          • (2020)A DDoS attack detection and defense scheme using time-series analysis for SDNJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2020.10258754(102587)Online publication date: Oct-2020
          • (2020)Load Balancing Algorithms for Big Data Flow Classification Based on Heterogeneous Computing in Software Definition NetworksJournal of Grid Computing10.1007/s10723-020-09511-5Online publication date: 15-Feb-2020
          • (2020)Evaluation of Lightweight and Distributed Emulation Solutions for Network Experimentation17th International Conference on Information Technology–New Generations (ITNG 2020)10.1007/978-3-030-43020-7_77(585-592)Online publication date: 12-May-2020
          • Show More Cited By

          View Options

          Get Access

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          Media

          Figures

          Other

          Tables

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media