The best way to emulate almost any network on your laptop! With using SR-IOV and VMs, the usage possibilities are even enhanced.

Based on Mininet 2.3.1b4

Mininet emulates a complete network of hosts, links, and switches on a single machine. To create a sample two-host, one-switch network, just run:

sudo mn

Mininet is useful for interactive development, testing, and demos, especially those using OpenFlow and SDN. OpenFlow-based network controllers prototyped in Mininet can usually be transferred to hardware with minimal changes for full line-rate execution.

Furthermore, to extend this work is CIMininet providing the additional node type VM and hardware-based links to replace the virtual Ethernet pairs to improve latency and throughput capabilities.

We have published the evaluation and results in the 2025 36th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 36) in Trondheim.

Please cite our work using the following:

Florian Wiedner, Dominik Kreutzer, Jonas Andre, Georg Carle, “Continuous Integration for Networks Supporting Low-Latency Using Hybrid Network Emulation,” in 2025 36th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 36), June. 2025.

CIMininet creates virtual networks using process-based virtualization and network namespaces or KVM VMs - features that are available in recent Linux kernels. In Mininet, hosts are emulated as bash processes running in a network namespace or a KVM VM, so any code that would normally run on a Linux server (like a web server or client program) should run just fine within a Mininet "Host". The Mininet "Host" will have its own private network interface and can only see its own processes. Switches in Mininet are software-based switches like Open vSwitch or the OpenFlow reference switch or Linux Bridges in VMs. Links are virtual ethernet pairs, which live in the Linux kernel and connect our emulated switches to emulated hosts (processes), or hardware-based links using SR-IOV.

Mininet includes:

• A command-line launcher (mn) to instantiate networks.

• A handy Python API for creating networks of varying sizes and topologies.

• Examples (in the examples/ directory) to help you get started.

• Full API documentation via Python help() docstrings, as well as the ability to generate PDF/HTML documentation with make doc.

• Parametrized topologies (Topo subclasses) using the Mininet object. For example, a tree network may be created with the command:

  mn --topo tree,depth=2,fanout=3

• A command-line interface (CLI class) which provides useful diagnostic commands (like iperf and ping), as well as the ability to run a command to a node. For example,

  mininet> h11 ifconfig -a

  tells host h11 to run the command ifconfig -a

• A "cleanup" command to get rid of junk (interfaces, processes, files in /tmp, etc.) which might be left around by Mininet or Linux. Try this if things stop working!

  mn -c

• CIMininet supports only Python 3

• Support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (and 20.04)

• Preliminary support for cgroups v2 (and v1)

• Minor bug fixes (2.3.1)

• VMs as node types including possibility to optimize VMs with pinning cores, memory, and much more.

• Using SR-IOV or other hardware interfaces cabled in a loop with set VLAN IDs as links.

See INSTALL for installation instructions and details.

In addition to the API documentation (make doc), much useful information, including a Mininet walkthrough and an introduction to the Python API, is available on the Mininet Web Site. There is also a wiki which you are encouraged to read and to contribute to, particularly the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) at http://faq.mininet.org.

Have fun! We look forward to seeing what you will do with CIMininet to change the networking world.

Florian Wiedner, Dominik Kreutzer, Jonas Andre, and Georg Carle