LiON: A L3 Protocol Agnostic Experimental Network Construction Tool Based on Infrastructure as Code

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new protocols and systems. This paper proposes an IaC (Infrastructure as Code) based tool called LiON (Lightweight On-demand Networking) for constructing virtual networks on the Internet for various experiments. For virtual nodes, various types of virtualization technologies such as network namespace, container, and virtual machine are supported. VXLAN is employed for virtual links between virtual nodes. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is adopted as the configuration file format, which enables the experimenter to intuitively design virtual network topologies. Layer-3 protocol agnostic experimental networks can be constructed, which enable to examine non-IP protocol stacks. LiON is implemented in Python and shell script. The time for constructing a virtual network slightly increases as the number of virtual nodes increases. TCP throughput of a virtual link is approximately 97 % of that of a physical link.