A new investigation of mininet emulator for evaluating software defined networks performance

Abstract EN

In this paper an evaluation of a Software Defined Networks emulation tool called Mininet is conducted.

Tests were conducted to study the performance of Mininet in emulating software defined network layers which are; the network infrastructure layer, southbound (OpenFlow Protocol) interface layer, software defined network’s centralized controller platform layer, and finally the real- time software defined network applications and northbound interface layer.

In addition, Mininnet limitations related to the simulation environment, resource capabilities are tested.

To evaluate the later, the scalability of Mininet in term of creating many topologies is tested with varying number of nodes and two different environment scenarios.

Results show that the simulation environment has a remarkable effect on the required time for building a topology, for instance, the powerful resources scenario needed only 0.19 sec, whereas, 5.611 sec were needed when the resources were less.

However, the required time were increased in both scenarios when the number of nodes was increased into 242.842 and 3718.117 sec for the powerful and less capabilities resources respectively.