Mininet: Rapid Prototyping for Software Defined Networks

Fork of Mininet 2.3.0d1

This is a heavily refactored version of Mininet that also supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and attempts to make it easier to add support for non-Linux systems. As such, the native install instructions are slightly different. This is also a heavy work-in-progress so things may be broken or unsupported.

What is Mininet?

Mininet emulates a complete network of hosts, links, and switches on a single machine. To create a sample two-host, one-switch network, just run:

sudo mn

Mininet is useful for interactive development, testing, and demos, especially those using OpenFlow and SDN. OpenFlow-based network controllers prototyped in Mininet can usually be transferred to hardware with minimal changes for full line-rate execution.

Features

Mininet includes:

• A command-line launcher (mn) to instantiate networks.

• A handy Python API for creating networks of varying sizes and topologies.

• Examples (in the examples/ directory) to help you get started.

• Full API documentation via Python help() docstrings, as well as the ability to generate PDF/HTML documentation with make doc.

• Parametrized topologies (Topo subclasses) using the Mininet object. For example, a tree network may be created with the command:

  mn --topo tree,depth=2,fanout=3

• A command-line interface (CLI class) which provides useful diagnostic commands (like iperf and ping), as well as the ability to run a command to a node. For example,

  mininet> h11 ifconfig -a

  tells host h11 to run the command ifconfig -a

• A "cleanup" command to get rid of junk (interfaces, processes, files in /tmp, etc.) which might be left around by Mininet or Linux. Try this if things stop working!

  mn -c

  (Note: this is a fairly blunt command that may remove non-Mininet related things)

Note, different platform ports support varying subsets of the base (Linux) version described below. Refer to the documentation/notes for each platform for the specifics.

Installation

The installation instructions and other details are found in the INSTALL.* files.

Documentation

In addition to the API documentation (make doc), much useful information, including a Mininet walkthrough and an introduction to the Python API, is available on the Mininet Web Site. There is also a wiki which you are encouraged to read and to contribute to, particularly the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ.)

Details about FreeBSD support are available on the FreeBSD wiki Mininet page.

The details and status of OpenBSD support are found in INSTALL.OpenBSD.

Support

This fork of Mininet is an experiment that isn't supported by the Mininet community; However, Mininet-related questions pertaining to the features of the original Mininet can be directed to mininet-discuss:

https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/mininet-discuss