On bringing private traffic into public SDN testbeds

The search for improved communication paradigms has fostered the emergence of publicly available testbeds supporting Software Defined Networking all around the world. However, a common shortcoming among these testbeds is the lack of real user-driven Internet traffic for experimentation. While having real user traffic inside a testbed is an undisputable advantage, the users' right for privacy and wish for availability of the network often make it impossible to simply make a testbed part of the communication path. In this paper, we discuss how a testbed operator can give privacy and availability guarantees to users who are willing to share part of their traffic with experimenters, thus making it less risky for users to opt-in to experiments. Moreover, we share the insights gained from implementing a Privacy and Availability Layer demonstrator.