Implementation of the FELIX SDN Experimental Facility

Abstract

The development of test environments as close as possible to the real world scenarios is becoming a fundamental requirement in designing innovative network applications. This environment must be fully configurable and reliable enough to provide similar results in multiple experiment runs. The federation of existing Future Internet (FI) testbeds is an initiative to fulfill these strict requirements.The FELIX project aims to define, implement, and deploy a control and monitoring framework which allows experimenters to execute their network services in a distributed environment spread across two continents, i.e. Europe and Asia. This paper describes the architecture of the software components developed to manage heterogeneous resources that constitute the FELIX infrastructure, i.e computing, SDN and transport resources. This article introduces the components of a modular architecture with particular emphasis on the provided functionalities, the exported interfaces, the dependencies and the relationship between the internal building blocks. Details of the implementation choices and the workflows to realize user requests are also presented.