A Framework for Implementing Realistic Custom Network Topology in Mininet

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology which enables the separation of control plane and the data plane in the networking infrastructure. Communication between the SDN controller and the network elements can be achieved using the Openflow switching protocol. Using Openflow the controller can create/modify the entries in the flow tables of switches which in turn can define the working of underlying networks. Mininet provides a simple and useful network test-bed for the development of Openflow applications and experimental network infrastructure. The default version of Mininet allows creation of few pre-defined topologies such as single, linear, tree etc. To create a custom topology, lot of programming effort is required in Mininet software. The goal of the proposed work is to develop a new framework for the creation of custom topology very easily without any programming. The new framework also enables the users to create separate IP subnets, the networks with different link parameters such as Bandwidth, Latency, Packet loss etc. Thus researchers can test their ideas and protocols using this new test bed. People working on Data Center Technology research can also make use of this framework. Experimental implementation shows that the modification made to the default version of Mininet does not affect the performance noticeably.