NePA TesT: Network Protocol and Application Testing Toolchain for Community Networks

A Community Network (CN) is a bottom-up network infrastructure that interconnects communities of people and represents a promising and successful networking model. The more people join a CN, the higher is the demand for a wider range of community services and the need for scalable network protocols. CN designers and passionates hence require adequate frameworks to develop and test different technical solutions, that must reproduce realistic environments and allow a rapid prototyping and deployment. We propose a full-comprehensive framework that can be used to develop new protocols and applications both in a flexible and portable manner. NePA TesT (Network Protocols and Applications Testing Toolchain) is based on the Mininet emulator enriched with: a library capable of creating random synthetic topologies with the most up to date realistic topology generators, a data set with topologies extracted from real world CNs, and powerful extensions to dynamically run and control the emulated scenarios. This paper will analyse and document each component and show how NePA TesT can be used in two realistic application scenarios.