Is Mininet the Right Solution for an SDN Testbed?
Olivier Flauzac, Erick Mauricio Gallegos Robledo, Florent Nolot · 2019
In this article, we study the possibilities offered by Mininet to create a proper virtualized testbed for software defined network (SDN). During our study, we focused on the isolation of Mininet nodes and their possibility to communicate beyond their enclosed environment by two different approaches 1) Testing Mininet's virtual environment and 2) by using a physical architecture combined with Mininet itself. We found that Mininet does not properly emulate an isolated environment due to a large number of security problems. Also, we observe that implementing a properly secured SDN testbed with Mininet is as complicated as using heavyweight virtualization software such as VMware. To be able to use multiples VLANs e.g., as in a real network, many additional configurations are required, and the results obtained are not adequate.