A virtual environment for network testing

The testing of network-based solutions demands a series of tedious tasks such as the deployment of the solution at different nodes and the configuration of different topologies. The manual execution of these tasks is very time consuming and a configurable environment to facilitate these tasks and consequently improve testing performance is desired. In this paper a virtual network environment that can be easily re-configured is presented to address this problem. The environment has been evaluated by a series of case studies: one dealing with the deployment and containment of a worm propagation attack and one dealing with detecting a denial of service attack. Three smaller case studies have also been developed. The results are a clear indication of the flexibility and usefulness of the virtual network environment.