| Software-defined networking (SDN) provides a new idea and method for studying the future network architecture and innovative network application. And building a convenient network experimental platform will promote the research and rapid development of SDN architecture and its applications. Network testbed provide a good experimental platform for testing and evaluating the network and distributed applications, but it is limited for supporting SDN experiments. Therefore, the main work of this paper is to extend the network testbed to effectively support SDN experiments.By analyzing the research achievement of network testbed and SDN emulation technology, this paper designs and implements a convenient network platform for SDN experiments based on the existing network testbed and MaxiNet emulation framework. Adding SDN experiment manager and nodes for SDN experiments to control network and experimental network of network testbed respectively, this platform can support SDN experiments. This paper presents the automated configuration method to effectively simplify the configuration process of SDN emulation experimental environment. It also presents the mechanism for recovering SDN experiment to quickly reconstruct the experimental network topology, re-execute operation commands, thereby reproducing the experiment scenario. From the perspective of an experimenter, this paper designs the SDN experiment’s lifecycle to illustrate the workflow of experimental platform in detail.According to the simple scenario of SDN experiment, we verify and evaluate the network platform for SDN experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network platform can effectively support SDN emulation experiments and provide the recoverability of SDN experiments. |
