NIEP eXperience: Aprimorando a Usabilidade do Emulador de Redes com Suporte à NFV NIEP

New networking paradigms have been developed to provide greaterflexibility and enable finer-grained management of computer networks.One of the most prominent new network paradigm is theNetwork Function Virtualization (NFV), which can leverage theNFV Infrastructure Emulation Platform (NIEP) as an environment forprototyping and testing virtualized network functions and services.Despite its versatility and comprehensiveness, NIEP poses a steeplearning curve for new users, particularly in the process of specifyingvirtualized network topologies. To address this challenge,this work proposes NIEPx, an assistive interface designed to simplifytopology specification within NIEP while minimizing commonerrors in the process. The effectiveness of NIEPx was evaluatedthrough a qualitative-quantitative model, which demonstrated itsability to reduce human errors during topology specification. Furthermore,the interface was tested for communication overheadwith the NIEP emulator, showing negligible impact in the analyzedscenarios. Thus, NIEPx emerges as an effective solution to facilitatethe onboarding of new users to NIEP, while also supportingexperienced users in handling more complex network topologyspecification tasks.