IoTSim-SDWAN: A Simulation Framework for Interconnecting Distributed Datacenters over Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN)

Software-defined networking (SDN) has evolved as an approach that allows network administrators to program and initialise, control, change and manage networking components (mostly at L2-L3 layers) of the OSI model. SDN is designed to address programmability shortcoming of static architecture of traditional networks such as those are used in current data centres. SDN has already shown great performance improvements in other fields such as flow optimisation or bandwidth allocation in a Cloud Data Centre (CDC), yet never realistically utilised for supporting Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) architectures for networking multiple CDCs. To support the testing and bench-marking of data-driven applications that rely on data ingestion and processing (e.g., Smart Energy Cloud, Content Delivery Networks) across multiple Cloud Data Centres (CDCs), this paper presents IoTSim-SDWAN simulator. To the best of our knowledge, IoTSim-SDWAN is the first simulator that facilitates the modeling, simulating, and evaluating of new algorithms, policies, and designs in the context of SD-WAN ecosystems and SDN-enabled multi-cloud data centers. Finally, IoTSim-SDWAN simulator is evaluated for network performance and energy against the real-time testbed for simulator adaptability.