Automatic control of an OpenFlow-based network using Lua scripts and SPLAY

This paper studies the SPLAY open-source framework that facilitates the design, deployment and testing of large-scale distributed applications. A mechanism for automatic control of a virtualized testbed created in OpenStack running Ubuntu 14.04.3 was implemented. The SPLAY entities involved herein were the following: a controller and a modified version of the daemons without using the sandboxing concept. As a proof of concept, measuring scripts and OpenvSwitch scripts (in Lua) were deployed through SPLAY agents. Thus we avoided the time consuming and boring processes of manual configuration of a testbed. Compared to legacy solutions (e.g. bash scripting) this approach provides scalability (the code is automatically distributed to a large number of nodes) and flexibility (the code can be tailored for specific nodes).