| e-mail to Steffen Maier
| creator |
Maier, Steffen
| | Herrscher, Daniel
| | Rothermel, Kurt
| | date |
2005-07-24
| | | | description |
During the development of network protocols and distributed
applications, their performance has to be analyzed in appropriate
environments. Network emulation testbeds provide a synthetic,
configurable network environment for comparative performance
measurements of real implementations. Realistic scenarios have to
consider hundreds of communicating nodes. Common network emulation
approaches limit the number of nodes in a scenario to the number of
computers in an emulation testbed. To overcome this limitation, we
introduce a virtual node concept for network emulation. The key
problem for node virtualization is a transparent, yet efficient
separation of node resources. In this paper, we provide a brief
survey of candidate node virtualization approaches to facilitate
scalable network emulation. Based on the gathered insights, we
propose a lightweight virtualization solution to achieve maximum
scalability and discuss the main points regarding its
implementation. We present extensive evaluations that show the
scalability and transparency of our approach in both a traditional
wired infrastructure-based, and in a wireless ad hoc network
emulation scenario. The measurements indicate that our solution can
push the upper limit of emulation scenario sizes by a factor of 20
to 30. Given our emulation testbed consisting of 64 computers, this
translates to possible scenario sizes of up to 1920 nodes.
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