Container-based Emulation of Network Control Plane

An ongoing challenge in network system development is in evaluating the design and implementation of its control plane, without actually deploying it at production scale. Existing approaches based on simulation or emulation have various limitations. The emergence of containers offers a new way of emulating network control plane. In this paper, we design a container-based emulation framework, and introduce its implementation with two concrete use cases: a centralized SDN control plane design in Open Virtual Network (OVN) and a decentralized design in Docker's libnetwork. Through sample scalability studies on these two designs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.