Assessing the Limits of Mininet-Based Environments for Network Experimentation

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Virtualization and emulation have become worthy approaches to save significant amounts of money related to physical resource acquisition expenditures. In light of this, the development of network emulation platforms has led a revolution in the research and testing of novel services and applications, as they provide a cost-effective, flexible and reproducible environment for experimentation. However, they present some practical issues, in particular, their scalability is one of the limiting factors as it links the emulated networks that can be successfully deployed on a given hardware. We address this matter by testing the consumption and exploitation of physical resources of one popular network emulation platform, Mininet. We follow a methodology based on the isolation of the threads associated to the operating system, the virtual hosts, and the monitoring tasks. In such a manner, this approach can measure the effect of the placement of threads in the available cores, and help optimize bottlenecks that jeopardize the results of network emulations. Additionally, we monitor several key performance indicators for general-purpose Mininet deployments in different network topologies, varying the number of active elements, links and network conditions such as packet loss or delay. Our results show that Mininet presents performance bounds in commodity servers that suffice a wide range of general network tests. It achieves aggregated bandwidths above 10 Gb/s and median roundtrip time values around 1 ms, even in demanding scenarios where more than a thousand hosts, up to 64-hop paths and 64