Towards a detailed OpenFlow emulator

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture that enables network programmability. Recent research activities on SDN make it important to develop an emulator that accurately emulates OpenFlow-enabled SDN networks. However, existing emulators and simulators focus on either data plane performance or software switches. This motivates us to develop a network emulator that provides accurate emulation on both control plane and data plane performance of an OpenFlow network and supports all types of OpenFlow switches. In this paper, we design a configurable emulator that allows users to input configurations and performance characteristics of different OpenFlow switches. Based on the performance measurement results from OpenFlow switches, we derive the configurable parameters and propose an accurate control plane performance model. Our implementation is based on a popular opensource OpenFlow emulator, Mininet with OpenvSwitch (OVS). The evaluation results show that the emulator we developed provides better performance fidelity than original Mininet/OVS.