A west-east bridge based SDN inter-domain testbed

Abstract

SDN is considered to be a promising way to re-architect the Internet. However, the Internet is managed by owners of different administrative domains, so the centralized control model of SDN must be extended to account for inter-domain traffic. Thus, this article proposes a WE-Bridge mechanism to enable different SDN administrative domains to peer and cooperate. Based on WE-Bridge, we further designed two innovative inter-domain routing applications as use cases. To verify our design, we implemented the WE-Bridge and the two use cases by building an international testbed on which WE-Bridge, together with the two use cases, are deployed. The testbed is composed of four SDN networks: CERNET, Internet 2 in USA, CSTNET, and SURFnet.