xSDN

An Expressive Simulator for Dynamic Network Flows.

Setup and Building

To automatically build the project and extract the core JAR:

chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

Executing

Executors are found in the main package. Run with mvn exec:java using the following CLI system properties:

Property	Values	Default	Description
-Dalgo	RandomRoute, AdaptiveRoute	RandomRoute	Routing algorithm
-Dconf	path to a directory	conf	Configuration directory (XML files)
-Dhealth	true, false	false	Enable HealthMonitor telemetry output

# Default run (RandomRoute, conf/, no health monitoring)
mvn exec:java -pl modules/xsdn -Dexec.mainClass="pt.inesc_id.gsd.ravana.main.XSDNExecutor"

# Adaptive routing with health monitoring
mvn exec:java -pl modules/xsdn -Dexec.mainClass="pt.inesc_id.gsd.ravana.main.XSDNExecutor" \
    -Dalgo=AdaptiveRoute -Dhealth=true

# Benchmark run on a generated caveman topology
mvn exec:java -pl modules/xsdn -Dexec.mainClass="pt.inesc_id.gsd.ravana.main.XSDNExecutor" \
    -Dalgo=AdaptiveRoute -Dconf=conf/benchmarking -Dhealth=true

Custom Simulations

You can run xSDN with your own network topology and flow definitions.

1. Use the Tutorial template: We provide a tutorial/ folder with sample XML files. You can modify these directly or copy them to a new directory (e.g., my_sim).
2. Mandatory Files: Ensure your directory contains:
   • network.xml: Defines nodes and links.
   • flows.xml: Defines traffic flows between nodes.
   • policy.xml: Defines SLA and routing policies.
3. Run the simulation:

mvn exec:java -pl modules/xsdn -Dexec.mainClass="pt.inesc_id.gsd.ravana.main.XSDNExecutor" \
    -Dconf=tutorial

Logging

xSDN uses Log4j2 for logging. The configuration is located at conf/log4j2-test.xml and is automatically included in the classpath during builds. The default log level is set to INFO.

Documentation

• Routing Engine Architecture — How the Infinispan distributed cache connects to XSDNFlow, the adaptive routing feedback loop, SLA intent policies, and how to add custom algorithms.

OpenDaylight (ODL) Integration

xSDN provides the core simulation and adaptive routing engine. For real-world emulation with OpenDaylight and Mininet, see SENDIM — a framework built on top of xSDN that bridges the xSDN engine to the OpenDaylight northbound API, enabling fully emulated SDN environments.

Future Work

• Real-time Web Dashboard: A lightweight HTML/JS dashboard that polls the KnowledgeBase to visualize live network topology and animate flow heatmaps, providing a richer experience than terminal-only output.
• Full Topology Distribution: Fully distributing RouteInitiator.possibleRoutes via Infinispan is partially satisfied — KnowledgeBase is already distributed. Full topology distribution is left as future work.

Citing xSDN

If you use xSDN in your research, please cite the below paper:

• Kathiravelu, Pradeeban; Veiga, Luis, An Expressive Simulator for Dynamic Network Flows, Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2015 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.311,316, 9-13 March 2015 doi: 10.1109/IC2E.2015.43