Features
Release 1.3 ("Eunomia") features
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Scalable southbound generator:
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Mininet based southBound idle stability tests: the current release of NSTAT allows for monitoring the controller response throughput to the SouthBound devices connected to it. The rationale is to be able to track the throughput at a given time while a stress test still runs. This is achieved by sniffing the OF packets sent by the controller to the switches using external tools i.e
tcpdump,pcaplibraries. -
Mininet based southBound active stability tests: the current NSTAT release supports initiating OpenFlow traffic transmission from Mininet switches to the controller's southbound interface. Each switch initiates traffic by having one of its attached hosts to generate traffic (Mausezahn, etc) towards another attached host on the same switch. Controller is able to learn the switches topology and forwards the packets along with their corresponding flows via the L2swicth feature.
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Fully automated, end-to-end testing: NSTAT is responsible for automating
and sequencing every single step of the testing procedure, including:
- component lifecycle management and orchestration: build, start, stop, etc., and synchronize the controller, emulator, NB apps
- test dimensioning: iterate the test over a large space of experimental parameters
- online monitoring and sampling: additional threads are being launched in the background to monitor component progress and collect performance results and runtime statistics
- reporting: report generation and result plotting
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Exhaustive stress testing: within a single run, NSTAT repeats the test over an extensive experimental space defined by the cartesian product of all test dimensions, e.g. the number of switches simulated by the SB emulator, the number of simulated hosts, etc.. This allows the user to express and execute multiple test iterations into a single run, and to easily discover controller behavior at extreme cases.
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Scalable traffic generation: NSTAT provides MT-Cbench, a multi-threaded implementation of Cbench, aiming at emulating large-scale SDN topologies with thousands of switches and bring controller performance to its limits.
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Unification of stress tests: NSTAT unifies existing and new test cases and tools under a common environment. A summary of the supported tests is given here
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Easy and rich configuration system: NSTAT allows the user to easily specify the test configuration parameters using a single JSON file. Nearly all test components and procedures from component orchestration to plotting are largely described by these configuration parameters.
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Comprehensive reporting and flexible plotting system: NSTAT provides comprehensive output in a single HTML report, including all the information required to fully describe a test. It is also supported by a flexible plot generation methodology (within the configuration parameters JSON file) which allows the user to easily specify plot types and parameters.
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Modular and extensible architecture: for most cases, NSTAT is not tightly coupled to a specific controller or emulator implementation or version. Rather, it is pluggable to any controller/emulator provided it adheres to certain conventions. Furthermore, extending the existing test dimensions and result statistics is rather easy and doesn't affect existing logic.
See the future releases page