Design and develop an OpenFlow Testbed within virtualized architecture

Virtualization has brought the revolution of utilizing computing elements, and also incurred the trends of cloud computing with distributed data centers built for enterprises. Recently, the network virtualization has become an issue for decreasing the cost and adding the flexibility of networking inside either the service platform or the infrastructure. Hence, research and education demands for testing new ideas about Software Defined Network in testbed have become more and more popular. This paper proposes a time- and resource-shared network testbed which integrates with Emulab system, Xen hypervisor and OpenFlow. This OpenFlow Testbed aims to provide an isolated, clean, quick-built and independent environment for each user to emulate OpenFlow networks. The implementation also has been verified with real use cases which are tutorials of courses in college. Users can build OpenFlow environment upon the shared and virtual infrastructure for network research and education purposes. Results also revealed that not only this network emulation testbed meets most requirements that real machine environment could provide, but also acquires benefits from virtualization.