Mininet - An Instant Virtual Network on your Laptop (or other PC)

Mininet emulates a complete network of hosts, links, and switches on a single machine. It creates a realistic virtual network, running real kernel, switch and application code, on a single machine (VM, cloud or native), in seconds, with a single command.
Mininet creates virtual networks using process-based virtualization and network namespaces - features that are available in recent Linux kernels. In Mininet, hosts are emulated as bash processes running in a network namespace, so any code that would normally run on a Linux server (like a web server or client program) should run just fine within a Mininet "Host". The Mininet "Host" will have its own private network interface and can only see its own processes. Switches in Mininet are software-based switches like Open vSwitch or the OpenFlow reference switch. Links are virtual ethernet pairs, which live in the Linux kernel and connect our emulated switches to emulated hosts (processes).