Large-scale SDN experiments in federated environments

International cooperation on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), crossing the boundaries of Europe, the Americas and Asia, builds a strong foundation for pursuing experimental research through advanced programmable network testbeds. The EU-Japan jointly-funded project FELIX (FEderated Testbeds for Large-scale Infrastructure eXperiments) considers the definition of a common framework for federated Future Internet (FI) testbeds, which are dispersed across continents. This framework will enable an experimenter to (i) request and obtain resources across different testbed infrastructures dynamically; (ii) manage and control the network paths connecting the federated SDN testbed infrastructures; (iii) monitor the underlying resources; and (iv) use distributed applications executed on the federated infrastructures. This paper details six use cases that will be employed to validate the FELIX architecture and software platforms. We present our analysis and end-user considerations, highlighting the necessity to have a global vision of issues within the testbed network. Resource reachability and coherent use of physical connections are key factors in the use cases. This is particularly important when considering the simultaneous use of different technologies such as OpenFlow and the Network Service Interface (NSI) among others.