Software-Defined Simulations for Continuous Development of Cloud and Data Center Networks

Today I am presenting my full paper at CoopIS. This is one of the core works of my PhD, and something that I have been working for, for the last 2 years. The presentation and the abstract are given below. The full paper can be found here.

Today is also my last day at Rhodes, and back to Portugal tomorrow very early morning! It was an amazing week at this lovely island with full of sessions and networking. I also had another paper in the conference last year as well, which was held in the same location, same days. However, I was unable to physically join the conference due to clash in travel schedules. Luckily, this time I made it!

Software-Defined Simulations for Continuous Development of Cloud and Data Center Networks from Pradeeban Kathiravelu

Abstract: Cloud network systems and applications are tested in simulation and emulation environments prior to physical deployments, at different stages of development. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables separating logic and execution from the data plane consisting of switches and hosts, to a logically centralized control plane. The global view and control available to the controller enable incremental updates, management, and allocation of resources to the networks. However, unlike the physical networks or the networks emulated by the emulators, current network simulators still lack integration with the SDN controllers.

Hence, currently it is impossible to efficiently orchestrate a simulated network through a centralized controller, or realistically model the controller algorithms and SDN architectures without having the resources for a one-to-one emulation. To address this, this paper presents SDNSim, an SDN simulation middleware, which leverages the principles of SDN for continuous development of cloud and data center networks. SDNSim is an “SDN-aware” network simulator that integrates with the controller through plugins for southbound protocols such as OpenFlow, to execute the algorithms incrementally thus deployed in the control plane.