Automatic Experimentation
OpenLANES addresses a critical issue in current networking experimentation by extending the complexity of the network to the relevant environment level for current networks accommodating hundreds of interconnected nodes, also, the built-in automatic iteration through already available network topologies and their dynamic changes enables the easy deployment and validation across many potential network environments.
Only with this feature, innovation can be realistically validated for deployment in real networks. Comparatively, networks with a reduced number of nodes do not account for side effects and for the complexity of running in parallel multiple instances, interfaces or decision chains, missing the opportunity of useful understanding of their behavior in their target environments.
For emulating the network, OpenLANES includes three different planes:
- Network configurations - using a large database of common TLE or JSON network description files for the network topologies and their dynamicity
- An emulation controller able to deploy the initial network nodes and links, to sequentially interpret the configuration files and to adapt the large-scale emulation accordingly
- A virtual network layer which receives the new configurations and adapts in real-time the links between the emulation nodes.