PrimoGENI: Integrating Real-Time Network Simulation and Emulation in GENI

Abstract

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a community-driven research and development effort to build a collaborative and exploratory network experimentation platform -- a "virtual laboratory'' for the design, implementation and evaluation of future networks. The PrimoGENI project enables real-time network simulation by extending an existing network simulator to become part of the GENI federation to support large-scale experiments involving physical, simulated and emulated network entities. In this paper, we describe a novel design of PrimoGENI, which aims at supporting realistic, scalable, and flexible network experiments with real-time simulation and emulation capabilities. We present a flexible emulation infrastructure that allows both remote client machines and local cluster nodes running virtual machines to seamlessly interoperate with the simulated network running within a designated "slice'' of resources. We show the results of our preliminary validation and performance studies to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of our approach.