A Right Placement Makes a Happy Emulator: a Placement Module for Distributed SDN/NFV Emulation

To handle the ever growing demand of resource intensive experiments distributed, network emulation tools such as Mininet and Maxinet have been proposed. They automatically allocate experimental resources. In this work, we show that resources are poorly allocated, leading to resource overloading and hence to dubious experimental results. This is why we propose and implement a new placement module for distributed emulation. Our algorithms take into account both link and node resources and minimize the number of physical hosts needed to carry out the emulation. Through extensive numerical evaluations, simulations, and actual experiments, we show that our placement methods outperform existing ones and allowing to re-establish trust in experimental results.