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Using Mininet for emulation and prototyping Software-Defined Networks

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DOI: 10.1109/ColComCon.2014.6860404

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 Using Mininet for Emulation and Prototyping
Software-Defined Networks

Rogério Leão Santos de Oliveira Ailton Akira Shinoda

Jales Technology College Electrical Engineering Department
State Center of Technology Education "Paula Souza" São Paulo State University “Julio de Mesquita Filho”
Jales, Brazil Ilha Solteira, Brazil
[email protected] [email protected] r

Christiane Marie Schweitzer Ligia Rodrigues Prete

Mathematics Department Jales Technology College
São Paulo State University “Julio de Mesquita Filho” State Center of Technology Education "Paula Souza"
Ilha Solteira, Brazil Jales, Brazil
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract— Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) represents an systems are being connected to the network. Indeed, the
innovative approach in the area of computer networks, since they concept of computer networks is beginning to seem somewhat
propose a new model to control forwarding and routing data outdated, considering the large number of non-traditional
packets that navigate the World Wide Web. Since research on equipment being connected to the Internet [1].
this topic is still in progress, there are not many devices such as
routers and switches that implement SDN functionalities; In the meantime this worldwide network of computers
moreover, the existing ones are very expensive. Thus, in order to known as the Internet provides communication around the
make researchers able to do experiments and to test novel world, even though promoting sometimes dependence in the
features of this new paradigm in practice at a low financial cost, users, it faces a problem. The level of maturity in its structure
one solution is to use virtual network emulators. As a result, this
paper focuses on study and evaluation of SDN emulation tool
also reduced its flexibility. Implementations of new
called Mininet. Initial tests suggested that the capacity of rapid technologies often require replacement of hardware devices
and simplified prototyping, the ensuring applicability, the (routers and switches), what can be very expensive and very
possibility of sharing results and tools at zero cost are positive hard-working for network administrators.
factors that help scientists boost their researches despite the The research community of computer networks has been
limitations of the tool in relation to the performance fidelity searching for solutions that enable the use of networks with
between the simulated and the real environment. After
presenting some concepts of this paradigm, the purpose of its
more programming resources and less need for replacement of
appearance, its elements and how it works, some net prototypes hardware elements, so that new technologies designed to solve
are created to better understand the Mininet tool and an new problems can be inserted gradually into the network and
evaluation is done to demonstrate its advantages and without significant costs.
disadvantages. The section 2 of this paper discusses the SDN paradigm
reporting its motivation, the network elements that are part of
Keywords — Software Defined Networking, emulation, this new structure as well as the operation of these components
OpenFlow, virtualization, Floodlight, Mininet. by comparing them to the traditional structure. The content of
section 3 presents the simulation tool called Mininet and also
I. INTRODUCTION describes some SDN controllers. The section 4 proposes an
It is evident the immense success of the computer networks environment simulation using the presented SDN tools where
today. Majority of the people’s activities, directly or indirectly, tests are performed. These tests provide us results to discuss the
use resources or services offered by communication networks. topic of this work in section 5. Finally, section 6 describes
other network simulators and section 7 presents the conclusion
The Internet is a computer network that interconnects and suggestions for future works.
thousands of computing devices around the world. A little time
ago, these devices were basically desktop computers, II. SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKS
workstations, and so-called servers that store and transmit
information, such as web pages and e-mail messages. To mitigate flexibility problems, the complex
However, more and more devices such as TVs, laptops, game administration of the current networks, the researchers of
consoles, cell phones, webcams, cars and electronic security computer networks have invested in initiatives that implements
networks with greater programming capabilities and reduce the

978-1-4799-4340-1/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

need to replace switching equipments. Examples of such III. THE MININET
initiatives are the proposals for active networks [2], testbeds The paradigm SDN is still recent therefore the network
like PlanetLab [3] and, more recently, GENI [4]. Active researches have focused their on studies of the topic. When
networks, although they represent a potential item, had little those researchers want to test the new SDN features in the
acceptance because of their need to replace the network controllers, switches or even in the OpenFlow protocol, they
elements in order to allow them to become programmable. have some difficulties. Those difficulties happen specially
It is exactly in this context which arose the new paradigm because there are so few cheap devices available that are able
called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). It's a structure to implement in SDN standard. Moreover, in more specific
that aims to preserve the current performance on routing and cases, when it is necessary to simulate large networks with
forwarding data packets, since it maintains the actual structure large numbers of hosts, switches and SDN controllers, using
with dedicated routers doing this job, but at the same time it the Internet may not be a good idea, because improper
delegates the method as it will be done to a new component, configurations can cause unwanted problems.
the controller. One of the solutions for this problem is making prototypes
and simulating them in virtual mode. To do this, some tools
A. The SDN elements have been created and one of them is the Mininet software [8].
The SDN structure consists of three components:
controllers, programmable switching elements and the standard The Mininet is a system that allows rapidly prototyping
protocol for communication between them. large networks on a single computer. It creates scalable
Software-defined networks using lightweight virtualization
The controllers or Network Operating Systems provides a mechanisms, such as processes and network namespaces.
programming interface where the developer or administrator These features permit the Mininet create, interact with,
can access the events generated by a network interface and can customize and share the prototypes quickly.
also generate commands to control the forwarding and routing
Some characteristics guided the creation of Mininet are 1)
of packets in the programmable switches.
flexibility, that is, new topologies and new features can be set
This element centralizes all communication with the in software, using programming languages and common
programmable switching elements that compose the network, operating systems; 2) applicability, correctly implementations
so providing a unified view of the network status. This also done in prototypes should be also usable in real networks based
simplifies the activity of network administrators, which did not on hardware without any changes in source codes; 3)
need ‘to know in depth’ the details of the programming of the interactivity, management and running the simulated network
switching elements. must occur in real time as if it happens in real networks; 4)
scalability, the prototyping environment must be scaling to
This new network control structure allows us to have a large networks with hundreds or thousands of switches on only
more effective and independent management. The controllers a computer; 5) realistic, the prototype behavior should
can implement more sophisticated traffic monitoring rules, for represent real time behavior with a high degree of confidence,
example, a solution that provides new abstractions for users, so applications and protocols stacks should be usable without
giving for each one the view that their machines are connected any code modification; and finally 6) share-able, the created
to a single and private switch, independent on others. prototypes should be easily shared with other collaborators,
The switches and network routers, previously independent which can then run and modify the experiments.
and autonomous, are now configured by the network
controllers, that can implement rules for switching and policies A. SDN elements on Mininet
for security, based on higher abstraction levels than the current The Mininet can create SDN elements, customize them,
model, because were previously defined by network share them with other networks and perform interactions.
administrators in the controller. These elements include Hosts, Switches, Controllers and Links.
From a historical standpoint, SDNs have their origin in the A host on Mininet is a simple process with its own network
definition of network structure Ethane [6], which defined to environment running on the operating system. Each one
implement access control policies in a distributed way from a provides processes with exclusive ownership virtual network
centralized monitoring mechanism [7]. In this structure, each interface, ports, addresses and routing tables (such as ARP and
network element should consult the supervisor element to IP). The OpenFlow switches created by Mininet provide the
identify a new flow. The supervisor consult a global policies same packet delivery semantic that would be provided by a
group to decide, based on the characteristics of each flow, as hardware switch. Both user-space and kernel-space switches
the routing member should treat it. This decision would be are available. In Mininet simulation, the controllers can be run
communicated to the switch with a rule in its routing table, on the real or simulated network as long as the machine on
until sometimes a discarding rule. This model was later which the switches are running has connectivity to the
formalized by some of the authors in to OpenFlow protocol [5]. controller. If desired, the Mininet creates a standard controller
This is the third and no less important element of the SDN inside the local simulation environment, and virtual
structure. connections can also be created among the elements through
their virtual interfaces.
For example, the command line
 mn –topo single,3 –mac –switch ovsk –controller remote C. The SDN controllers and the Mininet.
creates three virtual hosts, creates a single Software OpenFlow The SDN principle is the capability to control the packet
switch in kernel with 3 ports, connects the virtual switch using forwarding process through a unique interface. The controller
virtual links, sets the MAC and IP addresses for each host and can center all communications with the programmable network
then finally configures the switch to connect to a remote elements and provide a single view of its state by isolating the
controller. In this case, the controller is running locally on the details of each element.
same hardware that the simulator Mininet is running. One of the SDN advantages is exactly this centralized view
of the network that makes possible to develop a detailed
B. Interacting with a network and using control tools. analysis and to decide how the system should operate.
After creating the elements and all the connections between The Mininet emulator implements connection between
them, it is crucial to be able to run commands on hosts to test switches and different controllers, such as NOX and Floodlight
network functionality, and verify switch operation. for instance. This possibility allows developers interested in
For this purpose, the Mininet includes a command line creating and testing controller resources to be able to use
interface to allow developers to control and manage an entire Mininet to perform their simulations.
network. Typed commands are interpreted by the emulator and
executed in the simulated network environment. IV. SIMULATING A SDN ON MININET AND FLOODLIGHT
For example: CONTROLLER.
Floodlight [9] is an OpenFlow controller for enterprise
mininet > nodes
networks based on Java programming language and distributed
Displays available node list;
under the Apache license. The first project originated from the
mininet > help Beacon controller [12] and now it is supported by a developers’
Displays available network command list; community and also by Big Switch Networks, a start-up that
produces commercial hardware controllers. The core and main
mininet > h2 ifconfig modules are written in Java. Recently, the Jython programming
Displays host IP address, h2 in this case; language was included in the project allowing development in
mininet > h2 ping h1 Python. In its infrastructure, all the elements are modules and
Sends a packet (ICMP REQUEST) from host2 to host1. these modules provide services. All the communication among
modules is done through services. The ItopologyService
interface allows discovering the network topology
Several examples and tools, such as text-based scripts and
automatically; moreover, it can integrating non OpenFlow
graphic applications, are in the virtual machine that contains
networks and is compatible with the simulation tool Mininet.
the Mininet. Two very useful tools to monitor and measure the
functionality of the Mininet networks are dpctl and wireshark. This section presents samples of Mininet utilization with
the Floodlight controller software. The objectives are testing
The dpctl is a tool that can display and control the flow
the emulation tool in different types of networks and obtain
table of switches. It is especially useful for debugging, because
viability results.
it allows viewing the flow state and flowmeters. Most switches
that implement OpenFlow listening to commands on port 6634
(by default), what makes it possible to interact with the switch A. Emulation environment specifications.
without needing to add debugging code in the controller. For the experiments we used a microcomputer HP Compaq
8200 Elite SFF PC with the following specifications: Processor
For example, the command line Intel ® Core ™ i5-2400 3.10GHz, 4GB of RAM running the
dpctl dump-flows tcp:127.0.0.1:6634 Operating System Windows 7 64bits and VirtualBox Oracle
VM version 4.2.12.
connects to the switch and displays the flow table installed.
It is also possible to enter rules in the switches’ flow tables In this microcomputer, under the management of
manually. The command line, for example, VirtualBox, we installed the following guest operating systems:
Mininet Emulator version 2.0 on Linux operating system
dpctl add-flow tcp:127.0.0.1:6634 in_port=1, Ubuntu 10.12 64bits with 1Gb of RAM; Floodlight Controller
actions=output:2 version 0.90 on Linux operating system Ubuntu 12.10 64bits
creates a rule in which all packets arriving at port 1 of the with 256MB of RAM.
switch will be forwarded to port 2.
The wireshark is a tool that captures and dissects all data B. Running tests.
packets transmitted by network interfaces. Exclusively for In this first simulation scenario we create two hosts, two
Mininet, wireshark has a library called OpenFlow (of) that switches, one controller and all nodes were connected with
filters all OpenFlow packets, so it allows OpenFlow packets wired links in according to topology in Figure 1.
captured by a local interface of the running hardware to be
isolated from other application packets. To use the tool, it is
enough just to run it along a graphic server.
 commands, but in the SDN paradigm, this task is performed by
the controller that can add, modify and delete any rules.

Fig. 2. Inserted rules on switches' flow tables.

C. Scalability tests.
Even in this environment, some scalability tests were done.
Fig. 1. Simulation topology. They will be explained in the following section. We created a
bash script that initiates different virtual networks topologies in
The follow command line was used to create the proposed Mininet, prints the amount of memory used up to this point,
scenario. destroys the virtual network and prints the time spent on the
mn –topo=linear,2 entire procedure. The script mentioned is transcribed below.
After creating the scenario, we execute a test of connection #!/bin/bash
using the packet ICMP (echo-request "ping") from hosts 1 to for n in `seq 1 6`; do
host 2 as the following command line: echo "n: $n"
h1 ping –c1 h2 echo -e "h1 free -m | grep ^Mem | awk '{print \"mem: \"
\$3}'\nexit" | \
The ICMP test execution succeeded, hence, no packet loss
mn --topo tree,$n 2>&1 | \
occurs. It is important to emphasize that no additional
configuration was set on the switches or controller, so the grep -E "^(mem:|completado em)"
communication was only successful because the ICMP packet done
sent from host 1 to host 2 when arrived at switch 1 which has The script execution results are displayed in Figure 3.
no forwarding rule on your flow table, so it sent the packet to
the controller which forwarded it to switch 2.
It is very negative for the packet forwarding performance in
the network if none of both switches has its respective flow
tables, because all packets will pass through the controller
before reaching its end destination. This way, there is
significant dependency and likely network controller
congestion.
To demonstrate this negative dependency on the controller,
some other tests were also run in this scenario.
The controller was disconnected from the switch and the
same communication test with the ICMP packet between host 1 Fig. 3. Scalability test results.
and host 2 was repeated. As a result, the communication cannot
be established, generating 100% packets loss. This happened It is noted that for the creation of small virtual networks,
because the switch 1, which has no forwarding rule upon the spent time is also very short and this time increases with the
receiving the ICMP packet, tried to send it to the controller, but increase of virtual nodes number. For example, the Mininet
this one was absent and caused the error. took approximately 64 seconds to create a tree topology with
255 nodes, while with 511 nodes, the time spent substantially
After that, with the controller disconnected, the forwarding increased for about 242 seconds. The graphic in Figure 4
rules were directly set in flow tables of the both switches and illustrates it.
the communication test with ICMP packet was repeated again.
The result was successful. The ICMP packet could reach its In relation to the amount of memory used for creating the
destination, because of the inserted rules on the switches; these virtual networks, as illustrated in Figure 5, while the number of
ones did not need the controller for forwarding the packets. nodes was little, the Mininet showed a lower memory
Figure 2 displays the rules set in switches' flow tables. consumption. This memory consumption was practically the
same until virtual network creation with 127 nodes where
It is important to remember that these rules were manually increased linearly after that.
added to the flow tables of switches as the following line
 which provides no guarantee that a host that is ready to send a
packet will be scheduled promptly, or that all the switches will
forward at the same rate [10].
The Mininet currently runs on a single machine and
emulates all hosts, switches and links in a single operating
system. All these elements share the same hardware resources,
what is a disadvantage for experiments on a larger scale.

B. Prototyping
Although not suitable for large-scale simulations which
require significant amounts of nodes, the Mininet is a great
software for prototyping small and medium networks.
Students, researchers, network administrators and other
Fig. 4. Graphic displaying the time spent for creating and destroying the stakeholders with a simple laptop can use Mininet for rapid
virtual networks. prototyping of a SDN idea. The short startup time and low
overhead enable exploring a design space and making a
Another paper [10] also made some scalability tests like medium scale system that runs on a modest hardware. Several
those ones and excepting only the differences found in the researchers can share scripts, configurations, topologies and
processing power of hardware used in both tests, the results work on prototypes simultaneously without interference.
were similar. Mininet begins to take longer to create and
destroy virtual networks and use much memory space when the C. Applicability
number of virtual networks becomes larger.
One of the most important requirements for any emulator
software is the applicability. In this context, all implemented
resources and ideas in a simulation environment must function
properly in real environments without significant changes.
The Mininet proves this capability since it allows those
tests performed in a simulated environment to be able to be
easily shared to other test infrastructure, independent on
hardware or even in a production environment.

D. Sharing
Thus the ability to share is perhaps one of the strongest
points of the emulator Mininet. A project, a topology or a test
code can very easily be distributed to the entire research
community. The emulator itself, when downloaded from the
Fig. 5. Gráfico representando a memória ocupada para as redes. official website [8], includes in the virtual machine package
initially, the Mininet, a variaty of different tools to perform and
analyze SDN prototypes, and a set of sample codes that create
V. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS. different SDN topologies and facilitate the development of
This new paradigm called Software-Defined Networks research.
(SDN) has received great attention from the scientific Moreover, it is also possible that researchers who create
community and from the network management system
additional tools, sample codes and different SDN settings can
manufacturers. Being a current topic with innovative trends
share them with other researchers. To do so, it is necessary just
and providing various application possibilities, this paradigm is
generate a new image for the virtual machine and distribute
being called "The Future of Internet" [11]. Therefore, many
manufacturers and researchers joined the idea of a network them over the internet.
structure defined by independent applications of hardware and
no longer just based on the principle of traditional IP Routing. VI. ANOTHER NETWORK SIMULATORS
The emulator software Mininet studied in this paper brings IMUNES [13] added virtual Ethernet interfaces and a
a unique contribution to the advancement of research on SDN feature similar to network namespaces into the BSD Kernel. It
paradigm and after performing several tests and reviewing enables rapid prototyping, but in itself it does not provide a
researcher studies, here are some considerations. path to hardware deployment or a means for distribution and
sharing.
A. Limitations EMULAB [14] took another OS-level virtualization
Currenty, the most significant limitation of Mininet is its tecnhonology, FreeBSD jails, and modified it to allow multiple
lack of performance fidelity, especially at high loads. CPU virtual interfaces per process group, similar to network
resources are multiplexed in time by the default scheduler, namespaces. EMULAB virtual nodes present a different design
point, emulating 10 or more nodes on a single PC with close Using the Mininet tool addressed in this paper, it is also
fidelity. Despite implementing lightweight virtualization possible to conduct further researches into Software-Defined
techniques, these tools do not support the OpenFlow protocol. Networks. Questions such as what the most appropriate
network abstraction is, how to implement clearance
Nowadays, very few network simulators support the mechanisms and how to configure the controllers to ensure best
OpenFlow protocol; one is ns-3 [15]. The ns-3 tool simulates reliability, performance and security, still represent a wide
the operations of an Open-Flow switch by compiling and variety of topics that can be explored.
linking an Open-Flow switch C++ module with its simulation
engine code. To simulate a real OpenFlow controller, ns-3 also
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Mininet has been used by over 100 researchers in more than
18 instituions, including Princeton, Berkeley, Purdue, ICSI,
UMass, University of Alabama Huntsville, NEC, NASA,
Deutsche Telekom Labs, Standford, and a startup company, as
well as seven universities in Brazil [10]. This fact is a good
indicator of advantages of this tool.
Future works could research about Mininet with other
external controllers and also compare the performance results
among it and other network simulation tools, such as PlanetLab
[3], GENI [4] and EstiNet [16].

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