A Mininet-based Virtual Testbed for Distributed SDN Development

The need for fault tolerance and scalability is leading to the development of distributed SDN operating systems and applications. But how can you develop such systems and applications reliably without access to an expensive testbed? We continue to observe SDN development practices using full system virtualization or heavyweight containers, increasing complexity and overhead while decreasing usability. We demonstrate a simpler and more efficient approach: using Mininet's cluster mode to easily deploy a virtual testbed of lightweight containers on a single machine, an ad hoc cluster, or a dedicated hardware testbed. By adding an open source, distributed network operating system such as ONOS, we can create a flexible and scalable open source development platform for distributed SDN system and application software development.