Placement Module for Distributed SDN/NFV Network Emulation

With the increased complexity of today’s networks, emulation has become an essential tool to test and validate a new proposed networking solution. As these solutions also become more and more complex with the introduction of softwarization, network function virtualization, and artificial intelligence, there is a need of scalable tools to carry out resource intensive emulations. To this end, distributed emulation has been proposed. However, distributing a network emulation over a physical platform requires to choose carefully how the experiment is run over the equipment at disposal. In this work, we evaluate the placement algorithms which were proposed for, and implemented in, existing distributed emulation tools. We show that they may lead to bad placements in which several hardware resources such as link bandwidth, CPU, and memory are overloaded. Through extensive experiments, we exhibit the impact of such placements on important network metrics such as real network bandwidth usage and emulation execution time, and show that they may lead to unreliable results and to a waste of platform resources. To deal with this issue, we propose and implement a new placement module for distributed emulation. Our algorithms take into account both link and node resources and minimize the number of physical hosts needed to carry out the emulation. Through extensive numerical evaluations, simulations, and experiments, we show that our placement methods outperform existing ones leading to reliable experiments using a minimum number of resources.