SDT: A Low-cost and Topology-reconfigurable Testbed for Network Research

TL;DR

SDT is a cost-effective, reconfigurable testbed using commodity switches that enables flexible network topology experiments with minimal overhead, significantly reducing evaluation time compared to software simulators.

Contribution

The paper introduces SDT, a novel low-cost, topology-reconfigurable testbed that simplifies network research experiments using commodity hardware and a custom controller.

Findings

SDT introduces at most 2% overhead in multi-hop latency.

SDT reduces evaluation time by up to 2899x compared to software simulators.

SDT outperforms existing Topology Projection solutions in cost and scalability.

Abstract

Network experiments are essential to network-related scientific research (e.g., congestion control, QoS, network topology design, and traffic engineering). However, (re)configuring various topologies on a real testbed is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose \emph{Software Defined Topology Testbed (SDT)}, a method for constructing a user-defined network topology using a few commodity switches. SDT is low-cost, deployment-friendly, and reconfigurable, which can run multiple sets of experiments under different topologies by simply using different topology configuration files at the controller we designed. We implement a prototype of SDT and conduct numerous experiments. Evaluations show that SDT only introduces at most 2\% extra overhead than full testbeds on multi-hop latency and is far more efficient than software simulators (reducing the evaluation time by up to 2899x). SDT is more cost-effective and scalable than existing Topology Projection (TP) solutions. Further experiments show that SDT can support various network research experiments at a low cost on topics including but not limited to topology design, congestion control, and traffic engineering.