Topology generators for Software Defined Network testing

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the potential future backbone of all computer networking. The main advantage of SDN is that it separates the control plane from the data plane. This delegates switching/routing decisions to a controller that is connected to the switches. The connectivity of the switches and controllers can be represented as a network topology. Usually a network topology has to be developed manually by hand before it can be imported to a simulator/emulator (like Mininet) for testing and evaluation. To ease this tedious problem, two topology generators have been proposed and implemented in Mininet. The first is a random topology generator based on the Erdös-Rényi model and the second is a generator that uses a SNAP format dataset to build the topology. Both the generators have been tested by generating large-scale topologies and they have been found to be working as desired.