NextLab: A new hybrid testbed and development platform for Software-defined Networking

Software-defined Network (SDN) is considered as a revolutionary paradigm shift of computer networks in bringing programmable networks and control-data plane separation. Over the last decade, SDN has received a remarkable attention from the networking society. However, much of the previous research is based on Mininet, Maxinet, One and DOT to simulate the SDN. These kinds of testing environment are obviously not able to achieve a proper outcome when compared to the realistic network. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid SDN testbed, called Nextlab that combines both the virtual and physical devices in order to provide a more accurate simulation. Such testbed is also equipped with a user-friendly GUI to save user's time in configurating the network topology. The experimental works show that the proposed Nextlab gives a better performance result compared to other traditional simulators, such as Mininet.