• Automation
• Data plane Programmability
• Testbed
• P4
• SDN

The number of users of computer networks has been growing massively in recent years and they have used computer networks to access a vast amount of services and applications. Traditional networks weren’t designed to accommodate and satisfy the requirements of these huge amounts and variable types of services and applications. Moreover, network operators and administrators faced major drawbacks from traditional networks and especially in the data center context. The introduction of Server virtualization in that context was the first step to resolving these drawbacks, however, it wasn’t enough considering that server virtualization didn’t bring virtualization and flexibility to the network infrastructure. Consequently, the scientific community introduced a new network paradigm to follow up with these new requirements. This new paradigm known as Software Defined Networks (SDN) thanks to the introduction of the concept of centralized control along with the separation of the control plane from the data plane opened the possibility to abstract the network complexity and program the networks. With SDN, the network engineer can update a policy or optimize it by only modifying the software instead of replacing a hardware device or reconfiguring the underlying infrastructure.

After discovering some disadvantages of one of the first standardized implementations of SDN the SDN-OpenFlow , the scientific community was interested in finding a way to make the data plane programmable and protocol independent. Subsequently, the data plane programming (DPP) concept was presented and started to get popular rapidly. The programmable data plane can be considered as a natural evolution of OpenFlow, where the network programmer using the Programming protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) language could program and instruct the forwarding device on how to process the incoming packets and their headers., This approach allows the network programmers to develop custom applications and new protocols without waiting for the devices’ vendors to modify the silicon of their equipment,  that’s usually a complex and time-consuming procedure.  The P4 programming language project is hosted and maintained by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and supports different hardware and software platforms.

In order to test a P4 program, the P4 developer needs a Testbed. Currently, most P4 Testbeds are either large-scale testbeds owned by a consortium of research centers or private testbeds that can’t be accessed without authorization .otherwise, the P4 developer has to implement a P4 testbed that can require a lot of time and effort to configure it, making the developers waste their time in configurations and this led to slower development of new P4 programs. therefore, this work aims to design and implement an automated testbed that allows a network developer to configure her testbed in order to test the P4 program in an automated and efficient way. In particular, some P4 use cases will be designed and used to validate and evaluate the testbed.