In this annual update of my list of open-source network simulators and emulators, I check each projects’s activity level, verify the well-maintained projects, identify new projects that deserve attention, and consider projects that may be fading away.
As of early 2024, my list of network simulation and emulation tools remains stable. This post provides the latest status of the tools I list in this blog.
I reviewed the development and support status of all the network emulators and network simulators previously featured in my blog, as of early 2023.
Mininet-WiFi is a fork of the Mininet SDN network emulator. The Mininet-WiFi developers extended the functionality of Mininet by adding virtualized WiFi stations and access points based on the standard Linux wireless drivers and the 80211_hwsim wireless simulation driver. They also added classes to support the addition of these wireless devices in a Mininet network
OpenDaylight (ODL) is a popular open-source SDN controller framework. To learn more about OpenDaylight, it is helpful to use it to manage an emulated network of virtual switches and virtual hosts. Most people use the Mininet network emulator to create a virtual SDN network for OpenDaylight to control. In this post, I will show how
When network engineers are learning the concepts of software defined networking and SDN controllers, they may want to experiment with SDN network scenarios before learning to write programs to be used by the SDN controllers. POX is a simple-to-use SDN controller that is bundled with the Mininet SDN network emulator and is used in education
When testing SDN functions in the Mininet network emulator and viewing captured OpenFlow messages in a packet analyzer such as Wireshark, it is difficult to identify which SDN switch is the source or destination of each captured message. The only reliable way to identify which SDN switch sent or received an OpenFlow message is to
When a researcher uses the Mininet network simulator to create a network of hosts and switches connected to an SDN controller, he or she may wish to be able to see what the simulated network topology looks like. The POX SDN controller includes a component that will send network topology data to the Gephi data
In this tutorial, we demonstrate basic software-defined networking (SDN) concepts using the POX SDN controller, POX components, and the Mininet network simulator. We will show how to use the POX SDN controller to update flow tables on the SDN switches in a simulated network so every host on the network can forward packets to another