  The main issue related to Software-Defined Network emulators is how to
replicate real behavior in experiments. Mininet and others SDN emulators have
an architecture that limits both the scope of experiments and the fidelity of
networking tests. Consequently, the serialization, contention, and load of
background processes may produce delays that compromise the operation of events
such as transmitting a packet or completing a computation, possibly
invalidating the performance evaluation of a network emulation. To address
these problems, this paper presents vSDNEmul, a network emulator based on
Docker container virtualization. Different from Mininet, vSDNEmul isolates each
node in a container and interconnects the nodes through virtual or tunnel
links. By using containers, vSDNEmul allows autonomous and flexible creation of
independent network elements, resulting in more realistic emulations. This
paper reports performance evaluations comparing vSDNEmul and Mininet. The
results obtained with the vSDNEmul emulator are more realistic and present
higher accuracy.
