Portable MiniLab for Hands-on Experimentation with Software Defined Networking

The new paradigms brought to the networking area by softwarization, not only are revolutionizing research and industry, but start deeply impacting on teaching. While in the past most of education in basic networking relied upon studying theory and learning standard protocols, today the hands-on experience is gaining paramount importance. In this paper, after briefly explaining how SDN changed the learning experience, we present a portable, low-cost, self-contained hardware laboratory to experiment with real SDN networks based on OpenFlow switches, valuable for both teaching and research. We then show some use-case that can be investigated within possible projects developed using this testbed. Though devised mainly for SDN, we will show that this testbed can support experimentation also of traditional switching concepts, such as packet classification. Finally, we introduce a short demonstration that can be presented live at the conference.