dot2net: A Labeled Graph Approach for Template-Based Configuration of Emulation Networks

Network emulation is an effective approach to ensure sustainable and reliable network services by verifying the correctness and fault tolerance of them. However, deploying and modifying emulation networks with existing platforms is time-consuming and prone to cause configuration errors because existing emulation platforms do not provide a suitable method for scalable network configuration. To overcome this problem, we propose the design and implementation of dot2net, a template-based platform for simple, scalable, and expressive configuration of emulation networks. The key idea is to separate network configuration into network topology as a labeled graph and label definitions as config template blocks. We evaluate the performance and efficiency of config file generation and show that dot2net is particularly effective at scaling the network topologies. We also demonstrate the expressiveness of dot2net for complicated networks and advanced technologies with test emulation networks of FRR, a widely used router software.