Research On Layer 2 Network Simulation Technology Based On Cloud Platform

The rapid growth of network communication technology has stimulated the development of new protocols and algorithms to meet the growing needs of communication ability.Developing and evaluating these protocols and algorithms requires a significant amount of simulation and testing.By comparing the characteristics of Live Testbed,simulation and network Emulation,it can be seen that the network Emulation technology has strong applicability and can achieve a relatively good balance in terms of cost and efficiency.Using a cloud platform(such as OpenStack)to manage VMs(virtual machines)and virtual networks,building a network Emulation system with applicability and scalability becomes an excellent solution.Because the cloud platform(OpenStack)is not designed for network Emulation,it can only manage Layer 3 network between virtual instances.However,there are variety of nodes in real network scenarios,to simulate large programmable switching devices is difficult to achieve(including heterogeneous hardware architecture),and solving this problem has become the focus of this paper.By studying the implementation of OpenStack cloud platform network virtualization,this paper proposes the idea of directly controlling the virtualization layer by self-developed software modules.Based on Linux Bridge virtual switch and VXLAN tunnel network technology,the Layer 2 communication link between virtual instances is realized.In addition,this paper designs and implements a cloud platform-based network Emulation system(Emulation test cloud),which can provide Network Emulation as a Service(NEaaS)for users and research teams;designs and implements the scheme of simulate the Layer 2 network device based on KVM virtual machine;combine the Docker container in the OpenStack platform,designs and implements emulation the Layer 2 network device using container;implemented simulation of heterogeneous devices and deployed the VLAN function of switch,and test the performance,capacity and other schemes of the entire technical route and conduct an overall assessment.Through the functional test and performance evaluation of the solution,the performance characteristics(operating system,hardware configuration,link parameters)of the simulated nodes in the Emulation test cloud can effectively correspond to the real network devices,and can also support user directly deploy network protocol and the realtime traffic application software in the simulated node,at the same time,the network topology can be quickly constructed and flexible configurated,and the the physical computer hardware can be utilized efficiently,the cost of the network Emulation can be reduced.The implementation of the Layer 2 network Emulation function based on the cloud platform greatly improves the applicability of the Emulation test cloud,and makes the application scenario of the Emulation test cloud more widely,which can be used to simulate and evaluate software for integrated network,self-organizing network,wireless sensor network,telecommunications backbone network,etc.So the research of this thesis has certain significance for the network simulation field based on cloud platform.