Hi there :)
Well before jumping into the details of Mininet and its constituents and making your life convoluted, let me just brief you about what mininet actually is and it's importance. To know what mininet is, you should first know about Software Defined Networks (SDN) !
Now what is this SDN? As most of you may know that in traditional networking, any networking device consisted of two parts - control plane and the data plane. The control plane is like the smart champ in the device which gives information for setting the forwarding table. And the data plane, which is quite fatuous, consults the forwarding table and forwards the packet to where ever the forwarding table points to. In a traditional network, both these planes were confined in the same device. Now what SDN does is, it decouples these two planes and a communication protocol is used to communicate between the two planes. The control plane, SDN Controller, can be a server running the SDN software. It talks to the underlying data plane (which can be physical or virtual) using protocols like OpenFlow. OpenFlow passes on the instruction as to how to pass packets from Controller to the data plane.
Okay..hope there were not many jargon's and you could follow what is SDN. Now coming back to mininet, Mininet is a tool that can mimic Software Defined Networks (SDN) i.e., you can create a virtual network in your computer. It gives you a feel of real network with working hosts, switches and controllers. Now you would be wondering why will you need the so called virtual network on your computer? Mininet is extensively used in development, teaching and mainly research as you can create whatever topology you desire and you can experiment with SDN and OpenFlow.
I hope you got the very basics of what is SDN and Mininet :) It's gonna get a lot more technical from now on..so pull up your sock and get ready ;)
Here are the links for some of the things explained. You might wanna look them up for further details.
1. Official mininet site : Mininet
2. More about SDN: Software-defined_networking
3. Basics of OpenFlow: Openflow
4. More about OpenFlow: Open Networking
Well before jumping into the details of Mininet and its constituents and making your life convoluted, let me just brief you about what mininet actually is and it's importance. To know what mininet is, you should first know about Software Defined Networks (SDN) !
Now what is this SDN? As most of you may know that in traditional networking, any networking device consisted of two parts - control plane and the data plane. The control plane is like the smart champ in the device which gives information for setting the forwarding table. And the data plane, which is quite fatuous, consults the forwarding table and forwards the packet to where ever the forwarding table points to. In a traditional network, both these planes were confined in the same device. Now what SDN does is, it decouples these two planes and a communication protocol is used to communicate between the two planes. The control plane, SDN Controller, can be a server running the SDN software. It talks to the underlying data plane (which can be physical or virtual) using protocols like OpenFlow. OpenFlow passes on the instruction as to how to pass packets from Controller to the data plane.
Okay..hope there were not many jargon's and you could follow what is SDN. Now coming back to mininet, Mininet is a tool that can mimic Software Defined Networks (SDN) i.e., you can create a virtual network in your computer. It gives you a feel of real network with working hosts, switches and controllers. Now you would be wondering why will you need the so called virtual network on your computer? Mininet is extensively used in development, teaching and mainly research as you can create whatever topology you desire and you can experiment with SDN and OpenFlow.
I hope you got the very basics of what is SDN and Mininet :) It's gonna get a lot more technical from now on..so pull up your sock and get ready ;)
Here are the links for some of the things explained. You might wanna look them up for further details.
1. Official mininet site : Mininet
2. More about SDN: Software-defined_networking
3. Basics of OpenFlow: Openflow
4. More about OpenFlow: Open Networking
No comments:
Post a Comment