Emulating networks offer more accurate and realistic results. Therefore, despite the high requirements for resources, emulations are often preferred over simulations in networking systems. Mininet is an enterprise-grade open source network emulator that is widely used in industries and academia. Mininet API and orchestration modules are written in Python, with core emulation performed by compiled C code. You may easily write Python code to emulate networks with Mininet, or to extend it with more capabilities. Mininet is capable of emulating an entire network one-to-one in your laptop. Each node in the network can be represented by a process in Mininet.

Due to its precision, Mininet is extended further for various use cases, including Mininet-WiFi (https://github.com/intrig-unicamp/mininet-wifi) to emulate wireless networks, MaxiNet (https://maxinet.github.io/) to emulate networks in a cluster, and Containernet (https://github.com/containernet/containernet) to have container support to network emulations. In this recipe, we will look into emulating networks with Mininet.