Experimenting with control operations in software-defined infrastructures

Recent years have seen a trend in network and service infrastructures adopting software networking paradigms. Traditional hardware, such as servers, network equipment and middleboxes, are evolving towards flexible equivalent software technologies: namely virtualized servers, routers and network functions, respectively. At this stage, such Software-Defined Infrastructures (SDI) are mixing traditional with modern solutions. Virtual servers host traditional operating systems, resulting in heavy virtual machines with most of their codebase often un-needed, and also a mismatch between the flexibility capabilities of the new entities and their equivalent management facilities, especially towards providing holistic service-aware capabilities. Along these lines, we present an open-source experimentation solution for flexible and service-aware management facilities on top of heterogeneous softwarized network resources, the Very Lightweight Software-Driven Network and Services Platform (VLSP). VLSP exhibits the following properties: (i) it provides a complete integrated management platform for SDI environments as a basis for experimentation; and (ii) it is distributed and scalable through adopting lightweight virtual entities, making it suitable for testing a wide-range of management features over diverse topologies. Here, we give the implementation details of VLSP and experimentally validate its operational advantages.