fam4r / Kathara

A lightweight container-based network emulation system.

• Official Website
• What is it?
• How does it work?
• Publications
• Installation
• Quick Example
• External Tools
• Join Us
• Docker Images and Dockerfiles
• Man Pages
• Examples and Tutorials

What is it?

Kathará (from the Greek Καθαρά) is a lightweight network emulation system based on Docker containers. It can be really helpful in showing interactive demos/lessons, testing production networks in a sandbox environment, or developing new network protocols.

Kathará is the spiritual successor of the notorious Netkit, hence it is cross-compatible, and inherits its language and features.

How does it work?

Each network device is emulated by a container. Virtual network devices are interconnected by virtual L2 LANs.

Each container can potentially run a different Docker image. Built-in images include Quagga, FRRouting, Bind, P4, OpenVSwitch, and more, but you can also use your own container images. For more information about Kathará images please visit the dedicated repository.

Kathará extremely simplifies the creation of complex networks using the concept of network scenario: a directory containing a file with the network topology, and, foreach device, files and folders containing the configuration of that device.

Kathará emulates network scenarios using either Docker or Kubernetes as backend virtualization system.

Publications

Kathará is developed by Roma Tre Computer Networks and Security Research Group. Several publications are related to this tool:

• Kathará: A container-based framework for implementing network function virtualization and software defined networks (at NOMS 2018)
  • Paper
  • Presentation
• Megalos: A Scalable Architecture for the Virtualization of Network Scenarios (at NOMS 2020)
  • Paper
  • Presentation
• Kathará: A Lightweight Network Emulation System (at NOMS 2020)
  • Paper
  • Presentation
  • Best Demo Paper Award

Installation

Install Docker and then run the installer specific for your Operating System. For a step by step guide check the Wiki.

For further information on how to use Kathará on Kubernetes please refer to the Wiki Page.

Quick Example

• Install Kathará by following the Installation section.
• Download and unpack the network scenario of a "Small Internet" from here (network topology can be found here).
• cd inside small-internet-w-dns-webserver and run kathara lstart.
• Kathará will read the configuration of the scenario from lab.conf and the various *.startup files and start the devices, opening terminal windows to interact with them.
• After you're done experimenting, simply run kathara lclean and wait until the network scenario closes.

External Tools

Being based on Netkit, all the previous tools still work. In particular we suggest Netkit Lab Generator, a GUI that allows the easy creation of a network scenario configuration and the visualization of its network topology.

Join Us

Kathará is an open source project. Feel free to download the code, play with it, and submit feature requests, notify bugs, or open pull requests!

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development of Kathará!