ScalaSEM: Scalable Validation of SDN Design with Deployable Code

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been emerging to be a new paradigm of datacenter network architecture. As SDN in the datacenter environment continues to grow in scale and complexity, one of the challenges to the SDN researchers and developers is to verify a SDN design before deployment. Although there are several existing tools developed with the goal to fill this need, they are unfortunately either lacking the seamless porting ability from a simulated environment to a real deployment (simulation-based approach) or suffering from the scalability issue (emulation-based approach). In this paper, we propose ScalaSEM, a system leveraging the advantages of both simulation and emulation methods to valid the SDN design. ScalaSEM establishes a high-fidelity environment with the real-world OpenFlow-based communication channel and abstracts networks with higher yet accurate-enough level. Through two usage scenarios and the comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions, we demonstrate that ScalaSEM provides the validating solution to the SDN design which can scale to the network with the scale of tens of thousands hosts and thousands of machines, and imposes no necessary to modify the implementation of the SDN design to move between validation and deployment environment.