Wireless Transport Emulator Based on LINC Software Switch

Abstract

Recent technological advances in the telecommunications industry have led to discovering the limitations of traditional communication networks and, in this context, to the emergence of a new paradigm that tries to mitigate them, namely software defined networking (SDN). SDN is beginning to infiltrate all the aspects of a network, and all kind of networks, from LANs, campus, enterprise, or mobile operator networks. Since this field is not mature yet, the interest from the academia and industry is very strong, thus having the right tools for research is critical. In this respect, mininet is a very good simulator of software defined networks. A software switch that can emulate optical extensions of SDN has emerged and has been integrated with mininet: LINC-OE. There is a need in the research community for a software switch that can be integrated with mininet and used to emulate wireless transport networks. This paper proposes a solution for that need by extending the LINC-OE for wireless transport: LINC-WE. In this context, two approaches are considered: the first is emulating the wireless links between two nodes and the other is integrating the LINC switch with a NETCONF server, for being able to expose a wireless transport device information model for simulations.