NestedNet: A Container-based Prototyping Tool for Hierarchical Software Defined Networks

Emulators for software-defined networks (SDNs) are important prototyping tools in validating network hardware performance under a broad range of topologies and parameters. Modern SDNs typically contain hierarchical collections of network nodes, each with interconnected compute devices. These devices often have widely varying compute environments making accurate emulation using discrete processes in a virtual machine (VM) difficult. In this paper, we describe NestedNet, a new container-based prototyping environment for hierarchical SDN systems. Each network node is represented as a Docker container. The node internals inside the container are implemented as nested Docker containers interconnected via an Open vSwitch. Unlike previous emulators, the execution of each heterogeneous component in a network node can be accurately performed using native code within the target execution environment. To demonstrate the flexibility of our rapid prototyping system, we emulate a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) topology of twelve interconnected nodes of five components each and evaluate its performance using throughput and latency metrics. Emulated throughput values of up to 32 Gbps per link are achieved.