Virtualization and emulation have become worthy approaches to save significant amounts of money related to physical resource acquisition expenditures. In light of this, the development of network emulation platforms has led a revolution in the research and testing of novel services and applications, as they provide a cost-effective, flexible and reproducible environment for experimentation. However, they present some practical issues, in particular, their scalability is one of the limiting factors as it links the emulated networks that can be successfully deployed on a given hardware. We address this matter by testing the consumption and exploitation of physical resources of one popular network emulation platform, Mininet. We follow a methodology based on the isolation of the threads associated to the operating system, the virtual hosts, and the monitoring tasks. In such a manner, this approach can measure the effect of the placement of threads in the available cores, and help optimize bottlenecks that jeopardize the results of network emulations. Additionally, we monitor several key performance indicators for general-purpose Mininet deployments in different network topologies, varying the number of active elements, links and network conditions such as packet loss or delay. Our results show that Mininet presents performance bounds in commodity servers that suffice a wide range of general network tests. It achieves aggregated bandwidths above 10 Gb/s and median roundtrip time values around 1 ms, even in demanding scenarios where more than a thousand hosts, up to 64-hop paths and 64

中文翻译：

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评估基于 Mininet 的网络实验环境的局限性


虚拟化和仿真已成为节省大量与物理资源获取支出相关的资金的有效方法。有鉴于此，网络仿真平台的发展引领了新颖服务和应用程序的研究和测试的一场革命，因为它们为实验提供了经济高效、灵活和可重复的环境。然而，它们提出了一些实际问题，特别是它们的可扩展性是限制因素之一，因为它链接了可以成功部署在给定硬件上的模拟网络。我们通过测试一种流行的网络仿真平台 Mininet 的物理资源的消耗和利用来解决这个问题。我们遵循一种基于与操作系统、虚拟主机和监视任务关联的线程隔离的方法。通过这种方式，该方法可以测量可用内核中线程放置的效果，并帮助优化危及网络仿真结果的瓶颈。此外，我们还监控不同网络拓扑中通用 Mininet 部署的几个关键性能指标，改变活动元素、链路的数量和网络条件（例如数据包丢失或延迟）。我们的结果表明，Mininet 在商品服务器中呈现出足以满足广泛的一般网络测试的性能界限。即使在超过 1000 台主机、多达 64 跳路径和 64