A Review of Available Software for the Creation of Testbeds for Internet Security Research

The increasing use of experimental platforms for networking research is due to their ability to support experimentation with complex systems, like the Internet, that simplistic simulators and small scale testbeds fail to reproduce. Therefore many projects and research initiatives have spawned - mainly in the field of Future Internet architectures. Although numerous publications can be found, most of them refer to prototypes and work in progress rather than to publicly available software that is ready to be widely used for the creation of testbeds. The first contribution is the development of a framework for comparing the available software based on their features. The second contribution is a literature review of state-of-the-art tools and their comparison under common criteria. This systematic analysis allows other researchers to make informed decisions about the usability of already available tools and decrease the initial cost of developing a new testbed, leading to an even wider use of such platforms. Our work provides the reader with a useful reference list of readily available software to choose from while designing or upgrading a research infrastructure, laboratory or experimentation facility.