DockSDN: A hybrid container‐based software‐defined networking emulation tool

The Internet has proven to be able to connect billions of devices across the globe. In order to keep pace with today's high demands or even larger services and applications, traditional ways of networking will have to change or update. The future of computer networks needs to be agile without degrading efficiency, capacity, and availability. These new trends push forward the need for network programmability. Software‐defined networkings (SDNs) are the future of networking, but in order to deploy newer standards, they have to be tested. Furthermore, this calls for better testbeds that are close to a real environment as possible. Many tools have been proposed to provide a framework for testing newer approaches of networking, but they have come short in various characteristics, limiting the scenarios and their results. Our experience in containers (Docker) and the development of testbeds using this technology has now brought our attention to SDNs. DockSDN provides a tool that meets current and future needs and is our biggest contribution to the scientific community so far. DockSDN is presented in this work, which proposes various benefits and advantages over other tools. One of those benefits is that it uses dockers as building blocks for scenario deployment. Moreover, these scenarios can be done fairly quickly and is fully scalable through local PC hardware or elastic through cloud services. Now, the scientific community will be able to test a wide array of protocols in near real‐world conditions, saving financial resources and time.