Conference PaperA hardware-in-the-loop emulation testbed for high fidelity and reproducible network experimentsWu, Xiaoliang; Yang, Qi; Liu, Xin; Jin, Dong; Lee, Cheol WonThe transformation of innovative research ideas to production systems is highly dependent on the capability of performing realistic and reproducible network experiments. In this work, we present a network testbed consisting of container-based network emulation and physical devices to advocate high fidelity and reproducible networking experiments. The testbed integrates network emulators (Mininet), a distributed control environment (ONOS), and physical switches (Pica8). The testbed (1) offers functional fidelity through unmodified code execution in emulated networks, (2) supports large-scale network experiments using lightweight OS-level virtualization techniques and capable of running across distributed physical machines, (3) provides the topology flexibility, and (4) enhances the repeatability and reproducibility of network experiments. We validate the testbed fidelity through extensive experiments under different network conditions (e.g., varying topology and traffic pattern). We also use the testbed to reproduce key results from published network experiments, such as Hedera, a scalable and adaptive network traffic flow scheduling system.2017-12-01100639582017 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC)408 to 418https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC.2017.82478031730488National Science Foundation