Openlab: A One-Stop Service Platform for Software-Defined Networks Emulation

The emergence of emerging services such as 5G/6G and AIGC has put forward higher requirements for future networks. More and more new network architectures are being proposed, and it is necessary to verify the correctness of new networking designs by emulating networks. However, existing platforms are inadequate in usability and scalability, failing to fully meet all the networking needs of future software-defined network experiment services. In this paper, we present Openlab, an open emulation platform for future network technology verification. Openlab uses virtualization technology to share heterogeneous resources and provides users with an on-demand, independent, and isolated simulation environment by test slice. In addition, it provides a user-friendly service interface to achieve one-click and multi-layer deployment of large-scale cross-domain testing environments. We evaluated the scalability of the platform by deploying real use cases.