A Network Topology Mapper

This page aims to serve as documentation for the on-going work to produce a topology mapping tool/service for the ORBIT testbeds.

Overview

Currently ORBIT does not have a framework with which users can easily set up network topologies for their experiments. Users may choose to build test topologies using methods such as:

• node-side packet filtering, e.g. ebtables
• switch partitions, e.g. VLANs
• SDN, e.g. OpenFlow

among others, but this entails impromptu scripting or manual configuration. In the ideal scenario a user should be able to set up an experiment by providing a topology description file to a framework that would build the topology on their behalf.

Components

The framework/service is expected to have at least the following components:

graph visualization

Two components:

1. interpretation of user-provided graphs into a topology description file usable by topology setup components
2. visualization of a topology setup from file

topology description file format

For now, ​GraphML has been chosen as the basis for describing topologies.

topology setup

both on the nodes and network:

• nodes : via OMF (sorry, not familiar with it) ?
• network : via OpenFlow e.g. a Floodlight module that takes a topology description and pushes static flows, or even CLI.