SDT: A Low-cost and Topology-reconfigurable Testbed for Network Research
Abstract
Network experiments are essential to network-related scientific research (e.g., congestion control, QoS, network topology design, and traffic engineering). However, (re)configuring various topologies on a real testbed is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose \emph{Software Defined Topology Testbed (SDT)}, a method for constructing a user-defined network topology using a few commodity switches. SDT is low-cost, deployment-friendly, and reconfigurable, which can run multiple sets of experiments under different topologies by simply using different topology configuration files at the controller we designed. We implement a prototype of SDT and conduct numerous experiments. Evaluations show that SDT only introduces at most 2\% extra overhead than full testbeds on multi-hop latency and is far more efficient than software simulators (reducing the evaluation time by up to 2899x). SDT is more cost-effective and scalable than existing Topology Projection (TP) solutions. Further experiments show that SDT can support various network research experiments at a low cost on topics including but not limited to topology design, congestion control, and traffic engineering.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2307.04023,
title = {SDT: A Low-cost and Topology-reconfigurable Testbed for Network Research},
author = {Zixuan Chen and Zhigao Zhao and Zijian Li and Jiang Shao and Sen Liu and Yang Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.04023},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
This paper will be published in IEEE CLUSTER 2023. Preview version only