ECCN: An Elastic Customized Cloud Network Platform

A network testbed with high flexibility plays an important role in testing and evaluating new network technology. Both researchers and engineers always need a network testbed which can customize network experiment on demand. Some of the existing cloud computing platforms lack network customization while some network experimental platform can not provide convenient virtual machine management functions. In this paper, we propose a preliminary implementation of the elastic customized cloud network (ECCN) platform based on Openstack project which provides cloud computing management and supports the Openflow protocol. This testbed can meet the needs of a rapid customized deployment of network resources like virtual machines, load balancers and routers in data center. Simultaneously, it provides the capability to generate and manage the customized network topology and an experimental environment where traditional network can interwork with Software Defined Network (SDN). Experiment results show that the ECCN testbed can help users deploy their own network experiment rapidly and easily with a friendly operation, as well as a flexible network design based on the highly customized experiment. In addition, ECCN guarantees the network isolation between different users based on reuse and sharing of the physical resources.