Evaluation of Lightweight and Distributed Emulation Solutions for Network Experimentation

Network emulation is an intermediate solution for supporting experimentation on new protocols and services which falls between the high fidelity of fully implemented networks and running simulation models executed. Lightweight emulation environments emulate entire networks on a single machine, thus enabling experiments that are much realistic and easy to use, at a fraction of cost and complexity when compared to real system. Scalability of a network emulation environment is very relevant when the experimentation scenario involves large amounts of networking devices, services, and protocols. In this paper we evaluate the scalability of some lightweight and distributed emulation environments. Experiments show the consumption of resources for each environment including memory, number of processes created, disk utilization, and the time required to instantiate models. Our analysis can be useful for experimenters to decide on which environment to use.