| description |
Performance analysis is a necessary step during the development of
distributed applications and communication protocols. Network
emulation testbeds provide synthetic, configurable environments for
comparative performance measurements of real implementations.
However, realistic scenarios require more communicating nodes than
usual testbeds are able to provide. In order to enable scalable
network emulation, various concepts for the virtualization of nodes
have been proposed. The overhead of virtualization strongly impacts
the total size of a scenario, that can be emulated on a given
testbed. However, the overhead of different virtualization
approaches in the context of network emulation has not been compared
directly so far. In this paper, we present a comparison of different
virtual machine implementations (Xen, User Mode Linux) and our own
virtual routing approach (NET). We discuss qualitative evaluation
criteria and present a quantitative evaluation showing the
efficiency of each approach in a traditional wired
infrastructure-based and in a wireless ad hoc network emulation
scenario. Our results give insights on which virtualization approach
is best suited for which kind of network emulation.
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