Mininet-NFV: Evolving Mininet with OASIS TOSCA NVF profiles Towards Reproducible NFV Prototyping

Mininet is a great prototyping tool which can automatically set up and configure customized OpenFlow testbeds scaling up to hundreds of nodes. This work presents the mini-nfv framework for NFV Orchestration, a general purpose VNF Manager to deploy and operate virtual Network Functions and Network Services on Mininet using standardized TOSCA NFV templates based on ETSI MANO Architectural Framework. Its goal is to alleviate the developers tedious task of setting up a whole service chaining environment and let them focus on their own work (e.g., developing a particular VNF, prototyping, implementing an orchestration algorithm or a customized traffic steering). By using mini-nfv, and its OASIS TOSCA NVF profile template it is also intended to bring some level of agility, standardization, reproducibility and replicability to the NFV experimentation world, easing the transition from emulated to real world experimentation.