Hybrid Testbed for Security Research in Software-Defined Networks

Tele-operations require secure end-to-end Network Slicing leveraging Software-Defined Networking to meet the diverse requirements of multi-modal data streams. Research on network slicing needs tools to develop prototypes quickly that work on emulation and practical deployment. However, state-of-the-art tools focus only on emulation, needing more support for a mixed testbed, including hardware devices. We decouple the topology generating from the actual deployment on destination domains and apply a divide-and-conquer approach. The master coordinator generates an Intermediate Representation (IR) layer, a serialization of the topology. Via a toolchain, the worker coordinators at autonomous systems convert the IR into full or partial deployment scripts. The testbed introduces a marginal overhead by design, allowing for flexible deployment of complex topologies to study secure end-to-end Network Slicing.