SDN emulation with Mininet

Mininet is the standard emulator used to emulate and prototype SDN systems quickly. As we do not assume that our readers have access to complex networks with SDN switches, we will use Mininet to build Software-Defined Networks throughout this chapter.

Getting ready

If your emulation stalled for some reason, before running your next emulation make sure to clean up the environment:

$ sudo mn -c

How to do it...

OpenFlow, an SDN protocol, is commonly used to control data plane consisting of switches in a centralized manner. This steers up network softwarization where networks can easily be reprogrammed from the controller. This essentially takes away the control of the network from the individual switches, and unifies and consolidates the control to a centralized controller. Thus, the controller is aware of the global network status and can modify the routing tables in the switches in an efficient manner.

In this recipe, we will emulate a large network along with a single...