LiONv2: An Experimental Network Construction Tool Considering Disaggregation of Network Configuration and Device Configuration

An experimental network environment plays an important role to examine new systems and protocols. We have developed an experimental network construction tool called LiONv1 (Lightweight On-Demand Networking, ver.1). LiONv1 satisfies the following four requirements: programmer-friendly configuration file based on Infrastructure as Code, multiple virtualization technologies for virtual nodes, physical topology conscious virtual node placement, and L3 protocol agnostic virtual networks. None of existing experimental network environments satisfy all the four requirements. In this paper, we develop LiONv2 which satisfies three more requirements: diversity of available network devices, Internet-scale deployment, and disaggregation of network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 employs NETCONF and YANG to achieve diversity of available network devices and Internet-scale deployment. LiONv2 also defines two YANG models which disaggregate network configuration and device configuration. LiONv2 is implemented in Go and C languages with public libraries for Go. Measurement results show that construction time of a virtual network is irrelevant to the number of virtual nodes if a single virtual node is created per physical node.