TurboNet: Faithfully Emulating Networks With Programmable Switches

Faithfully emulating networks is critical for verifying the correctness and effectiveness of new networking-related designs. Existing network experiment platforms either cannot faithfully emulate the functionality and performance of production networks or cannot scale well due to cost constraints. In this paper, we propose
TurboNet
, a new network emulator that utilizes one or more programmable switches to achieve faithful emulation of the network data plane and control plane. For data plane emulation, we propose a series of key designs, such as port mapper, queue mapper, and delayed queue, to emulate network topologies and performance metrics with high flexibility and accuracy. For control plane emulation, we support static routing configurations, distributed routing agents, and the centralized routing controllers. Meanwhile, we provide APIs for operators to simplify network emulation tasks. We implement
TurboNet
on Tofino switches. Evaluation results show that: (1) On the data plane,
TurboNet
can flexibly emulate various topologies, such as an 8-ary fat-tree with only one programmable switch and a 10-ary fat-tree with four programmable switches; (2) On the control plane,
TurboNet
supports about 200 BGP agents on a single programmable switch with a CPU usage of 25%; (3)
TurboNet
can accurately emulate different network performance metrics such as 10
⁻⁸
link loss, and microsecond to millisecond link delay.