Dynamic Link Network Emulation: a Model-based Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model-based network emulator capable of simulating dynamic, asymmetric link parameters over time, enabling testing of network solutions before deployment with high precision and flexibility.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture for emulating dynamic, asymmetric links in networks, integrating multiple technologies for comprehensive and flexible network testing.

Findings

Accurate emulation of dynamic link parameters demonstrated

Flexible configuration for various network topologies shown

Case study on satellite network validates approach

Abstract

This paper presents the design and architecture of a network emulator whose links' parameters (such as delay and bandwidth) vary at different time instances. The emulator can thus be used in order to test and evaluate novel solutions for such networks, before their final deployment. To achieve this goal, different existing technologies are carefully combined to emulate link dynamicity, automatic traffic generation, and overall network device emulation. The emulator takes as an input a formal model of the network to emulate and configures all required software to execute live software instances of the desired network components, in the requested topology. We devote our study to the so-called dynamic link networks, with potentially asymmetric links. Since emulating asymmetric dynamic links is far from trivial (even with the existing state-of-the-art tools), we provide a detailed design architecture that allows this. As a case study, a satellite network emulation is presented. Experimental results show the precision of our dynamic assignments and the overall flexibility of the proposed solution.