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On Node Virtualization for Scalable Network Emulation

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.