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Title: Enhancing Fidelity of P4-Based Network Emulation with a Lightweight Virtual Time System
P4’s data-plane programmability allows for highly customizable and programmable packet processing, enabling rapid innovation in network applications, such as virtualization, security, load balancing, and traffic engineering. Researchers extensively use Mininet, a popular network emulator, integrated with BMv2, for fast and flexible prototyping of these P4-based applications, but due to its lower performance in terms of throughput and latency compared to a production-grade software switch like Open vSwitch, it is crucial to have an accurate and scalable emulation testbed. In this paper, we develop a lightweight virtual time system and integrate it into Mininet with BMv2 to enhance fidelity and scalability. By scaling the time of interactions between containers and the underlying physical machine by a time dilation factor (TDF), we can trade time with system resources, making the emulated P4 network appear to be faster from the viewpoint of the switch/host processes in the container. Our experimental results show that the testbed can accurately emulate much larger networks with high loads, scaled by a factor of TDF with extremely low system overhead.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2113819 2247721 2247722
PAR ID:
10426812
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM SIGSIM-PADS, June 2023
Issue:
June 2023
Page Range / eLocation ID:
34 to 43
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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