Towards a Shared Evaluation Environment for Software-defined Networking

Abstract

The evaluation of Software-defined Networking control plane applications is a complicated task with many pitfalls. This paper introduces the vision of a shared evaluation environment for Software-defined Networking (called SEED), setting out to ease and speedup the process of designing, setting up and replicating simulative evaluations for both the researcher and reviewer. SEED introduces an additional configuration layer on top of existing simulators, specifically tailored towards SDN-research. SEED allows to load saved configuration files and run simulations based on them. It separates the specification of the simulated network from the application to evaluate and the precise experiment specification. This allows to publish, review and reuse simulation scenarios independently from applications. By exposing a unified interface for different simulators, it aims to cover a variety of use cases and make the configurations more widely usable.