Abstract
With the advancement of computing and network virtualization technology, the networking research community shows great interest in network emulation. Compared with network simulation, network emulation can provide more relevant and comprehensive details. In this paper, EmuStack, a large-scale real-time emulation platform for Delay Tolerant Network (DTN), is proposed. EmuStack aims at empowering network emulation to become as simple as network simulation. Based on OpenStack, distributed synchronous emulation modules are developed to enable EmuStack to implement synchronous and dynamic, precise, and real-time network emulation. Meanwhile, the lightweight approach of using Docker container technology and network namespaces allows EmuStack to support a (up to hundreds of nodes) large-scale topology with only several physical nodes. In addition, EmuStack integrates the Linux Traffic Control (TC) tools with OpenStack for managing and emulating the virtual link characteristics which include variable bandwidth, delay, loss, jitter, reordering, and duplication. Finally, experiences with our initial implementation suggest the ability to run and debug experimental network protocol in real time. EmuStack environment would bring qualitative change in network research works.
Highlights
The current Internet is based on a number of key assumptions on communication system, including a long-term and stable end-to-end path, small packet loss probability, and short round-trip time
Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) was initially invented for the deep space communication, while currently it has been gradually applied in wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, and even satellite networks
Physical emulation node runs Nova-Compute service driven by the Docker hypervisor to manage virtual emulation nodes and Open vSwitch agent to execute the managing emulation network commands from network emulator
Summary
The current Internet is based on a number of key assumptions on communication system, including a long-term and stable end-to-end path, small packet loss probability, and short round-trip time. In order to further study DTN architecture, many experimental platforms have been designed. QOMB has a good support for emulating a large-scale mobile networks, but it wastes lots of hardware resources since none of virtual computing technology is employed. Without using network virtualization technology, the emulation topology of SPICE is fixed and will be changed difficultly. With the advancement of network and compute virtualization technology, it becomes much easier to design and implement a scalable and flexible emulation platform than before. EmuStack, a network emulation platform for DTN, is introduced. Our design objective is enabling EmuStack to support a large-scale, real-time, and distributed network emulation and provide synchronous and dynamical precise management for topology and link characteristics.
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