A Testbed-In-The-Loop System for Experimenting with Network Configurations at Scale

There has been renewed interest in the research community recently in network control plane configuration analysis, verification, and synthesis [1], [2]. These researchers require a high fidelity testbed in order to validate their models, and to eliminate any divergence between the “models” they are building, and the actual behavior of the target running networks. They also desire on-demand creation of real-time, at-scale, repeatable, and programmable testing networks that closely emulate the real network devices used by operators.