Distributed mininet with symbiosis

Mininet is a container-based emulation environment that can study networks with virtual hosts and OpenFlow-enabled virtual switches on Linux. However, it is well-known that experiments using Mininet may lose fidelity for large-scale networks and heavy traffic load. One solution is to use a distributed setup where an experiment constitutes multiple instances of Mininet running on a cluster, each handling a subset of virtual hosts and switches. Such arrangement, however, is still constrained by bandwidth and latency limitations in the physical connection between the instances. In this paper, we propose a novel method of integrating distributed Mininet instances using a symbiotic approach, which extends an existing method for combining real-time simulation and emulation. We use an abstract network model to coordinate the distributed instances, which are superimposed to represent the target network. In this case, one can more effectively study the behavior of real implementation of network applications on large-scale networks, since the interaction between the Mininet instances is only capturing the effect of contentions among network flows in shared queues, as opposed to having to exchange individual network packets, which can be limited by bandwidth or sensitive to latency. We provide a prototype implementation of the new approach and present validation studies to show it can achieve accurate results. We also present a case study that successfully replicates the behavior of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack protocol.