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Reproducible Network Experiments Using Container-Based Emulation
, 2012
"... In an ideal world, all research papers would be runnable: simply click to replicate all results, using the same setup as the authors. One approach to enable runnable network systems papers is Container-Based Emulation (CBE), where an environment of virtual hosts, switches, and links runs on a moder ..."
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In an ideal world, all research papers would be runnable: simply click to replicate all results, using the same setup as the authors. One approach to enable runnable network systems papers is Container-Based Emulation (CBE), where an environment of virtual hosts, switches, and links runs on a modern multicore server, using real application and kernel code with software-emulated network elements. CBE combines many of the best features of software simulators and hardware testbeds, but its performance fidelity is unproven. In this paper, we put CBE to the test, using our prototype, Mininet-HiFi, to reproduce key results from published network experiments such as DCTCP, Hedera, and router buffer sizing. We report lessons learned from a graduate networking class at Stanford, where 37 students used our platform to replicate 16 published results of their own choosing. Our experiences suggest that CBE makes research results easier to reproduce and build upon.
SplayNet: Distributed User-Space Topology Emulation
- Proc. Middleware, 14th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference
, 2013
"... Abstract. Network emulation allows researchers to test distributed ap-plications on diverse topologies with fine control over key properties such as delays, bandwidth, congestion, or packet loss. Current approaches to network emulation require using dedicated machines and low-level operating system ..."
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Abstract. Network emulation allows researchers to test distributed ap-plications on diverse topologies with fine control over key properties such as delays, bandwidth, congestion, or packet loss. Current approaches to network emulation require using dedicated machines and low-level operating system support. They are generally limited to one user deploy-ing a single topology on a given set of nodes, and they require complex management. These constraints restrict the scope and impair the up-take of network emulation by designers of distributed applications. We propose a set of novel techniques for network emulation that operate only in user-space without specific operating system support. Multiple users can simultaneously deploy several topologies on shared physical nodes with minimal setup complexity. A modular network model allows emulating complex topologies, including congestion at inner routers and links, without any centralized orchestration nor dedicated machine. We implement our user-space network emulation mechanisms in SplayNet, as an extension of an open-source distributed testbed. Our evaluation with a representative set of applications and topologies shows that Splay-Net provides accuracy comparable to that of low-level systems based on dedicated machines, while offering better scalability and ease of use.
Energy-based adaptation in simulations of survivability of ad hoc communication
"... Abstract—Mobile wireless handheld devices can support ad hoc communication when infrastructure systems are overloaded or not available. Unfortunately, the constrained capacity of their batteries and the energy inefficiency inherent to the ad hoc communication poses a challenge causing a short lifeti ..."
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Abstract—Mobile wireless handheld devices can support ad hoc communication when infrastructure systems are overloaded or not available. Unfortunately, the constrained capacity of their batteries and the energy inefficiency inherent to the ad hoc communication poses a challenge causing a short lifetime. Protocols and application layer services, such as security, can be designed (offline) to do an efficient use of the resources. Realtime adaptation can further minimise their impact on the energy consumption, increasing the network lifetime thus extending the availability of network communication. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware adaption component for an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The component is in charge of adjusting the parameters of the IDS based on the current energy level, using the trade-off between the node’s response to attacks and the energy consumption induced by the IDS. The approach is based on a model for accounting CPU energy consumption in network simulation, which has been implemented in an existing IDS in ns-3. Simulations demonstrate that the adaption has a positive impact on the battery life time, increasing it by 14%, without deteriorating the network-wide performance of the IDS. Index Terms—Adaptation, energy-awareness, CPU model, energy modelling, survivability, intrusion detection.
A Virtual Time System for Linux-container-based Emulation of Software-defined Networks
"... ABSTRACT Realistic and scalable testing systems are critical to evaluate network applications and protocols to ensure successful real system deployments. Container-based network emulation is attractive because of the combination of many desired features of network simulators and physical testbeds . ..."
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ABSTRACT Realistic and scalable testing systems are critical to evaluate network applications and protocols to ensure successful real system deployments. Container-based network emulation is attractive because of the combination of many desired features of network simulators and physical testbeds . The success of Mininet, a popular software-defined networking (SDN) emulation testbed, demonstrates the value of such approach that we can execute unmodified binary code on a large-scale emulated network with lightweight OS-level virtualization techniques. However, an ordinary network emulator uses the system clock across all the containers even if a container is not being scheduled to run. This leads to the issue of temporal fidelity, especially with high workloads. Virtual time sheds the light on the issue of preserving temporal fidelity for large-scale emulation. The key insight is to trade time with system resources via precisely scaling the time of interactions between containers and physical devices by a factor of n, hence, making an emulated network appear to be n times faster from the viewpoints of applications in the container. In this paper, we develop a lightweight Linux-container-based virtual time system and integrate the system to Mininet for fidelity and scalability enhancement. We also design an adaptive time dilation scheduling module for balancing speed and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that (1) with virtual time, Mininet is able to accurately emulate a network n times larger in scale, where n is the scaling factor, with the system behaviors closely match data obtained from a physical testbed; and (2) with the adaptive time dilation scheduling, we reduce the running time by 46% with little accuracy loss. Finally, we present a case study using the virtual-time-enabled Mininet to evaluate the limitations of equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing in a data center network.
VT-Mininet: Virtual-time-enabled Mininet for Scalable and Accurate Software-Define Network Emulation General Terms Emulation Keywords Virtual Time; Network Emulation; SDN; Mininet
"... ABSTRACT The advancement of software-defined networking (SDN) technology is highly dependent on the successful transformations from in-house research ideas to real-life products. To enable such transformations, a testbed offering scalable and high fidelity networking environment for testing and eva ..."
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ABSTRACT The advancement of software-defined networking (SDN) technology is highly dependent on the successful transformations from in-house research ideas to real-life products. To enable such transformations, a testbed offering scalable and high fidelity networking environment for testing and evaluating new/existing designs is extremely valuable. Mininet, the most popular SDN emulator by far, is designed to achieve both accuracy and scalability by running unmodified code of network applications in lightweight Linux Containers. However, Mininet cannot guarantee performance fidelity under high workloads, in particular when the number of concurrent active events is more than the number of parallel cores. In this project, we develop a lightweight virtual time system in Linux container and integrate the system with Mininet, so that all the containers have their own virtual clocks rather than using the physical system clock which reflects the serialized execution of multiple containers. With the notion of virtual time, all the containers perceive virtual time as if they run independently and concurrently. As a result, interactions between the containers and the physical system are artificially scaled, making a network appear to be ten times faster from the viewpoint of applications within the containers than it actually is. We also design an adaptive virtual time scheduling subsystem in Mininet, which is responsible to balance the experiment speed and fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that embedding virtual time into Mininet significantly enhances its performance fidelity, and therefore, results in a useful platform for the SDN community to conduct scalable experiments with high fidelity.
FANTASY: Fully Automatic Network Emulation Architecture with Cross-Layer Support
"... ABSTRACT Testing and evaluating real-world wireless and mobile systems is very difficult. The volatile nature of the wireless medium and mobility complicates their evaluation. The access to system information hindered by the operating system further increases the evaluation of a real-world system. ..."
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ABSTRACT Testing and evaluating real-world wireless and mobile systems is very difficult. The volatile nature of the wireless medium and mobility complicates their evaluation. The access to system information hindered by the operating system further increases the evaluation of a real-world system. In contrast, a simulator allows to easily set up complex wireless and mobile scenarios, log protocol variables of interest and to repeat the whole test easily if desired. Developers of real-world systems also want to perform tests with the simplicity and convenience of a simulation without loosing the ability to execute arbitrary networking software in its genuine environment (an operating system). In this paper, we present fantasy, a new network emulation architecture that allows the fully automated setup and execution of an experiment, enables the convenient access to system information and the collection of test results. With the integration of the cross-layer architecture crawler, we demonstrate that we are able to monitor parameters across protocol layers and to evaluate network emulation scenarios where cross-layer optimization is involved.
Device Driver-enabled Wireless Network Emulation
"... ABSTRACT Testing and evaluating the performance of actual software for wireless networks is difficult. Real-world wireless testbeds are costly and cumbersome to maintain. Measurement studies are complicated by many uncontrollable environmental influences, particularly the wireless channel. Network ..."
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ABSTRACT Testing and evaluating the performance of actual software for wireless networks is difficult. Real-world wireless testbeds are costly and cumbersome to maintain. Measurement studies are complicated by many uncontrollable environmental influences, particularly the wireless channel. Network simulations on the contrary allow the convenient analysis of wireless networks with a maximum level of controllability; however they typically do not allow the execution of arbitrary and unmodified wireless communication software inside the simulation environment. In this paper, we present a new network emulation architecture for the evaluation of wireless communication software. By bridging the gap between simulation and wireless software using a custom device driver, our framework enables arbitrary and unmodified wireless communication software to be evaluated in a fully simulated network. In accordance to this architecture we present a new 802.11 emulation framework based on ns-3 that allows the investigation of arbitrary Wi-Fi software for Linux. It eases both the development and the performance analysis of present and future Wi-Fi software.
EasyScale: Easy Mapping for Large-Scale Network Security Experiments
"... Abstract—Network emulation enables network security evaluation using unmodified implementations. Experimental fidelity with emulation is higher than simulation through the integration of real hardware and systems, but the scalability of emulation testbeds is limited. Scaling techniques such as virtu ..."
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Abstract—Network emulation enables network security evaluation using unmodified implementations. Experimental fidelity with emulation is higher than simulation through the integration of real hardware and systems, but the scalability of emulation testbeds is limited. Scaling techniques such as virtualization and real-time simulation enable larger scale experiments. Using scalingtechniquesfornetworksecurityexperimentscan,however, require considerable expertise in order to avoid overloading resources. In this paper, we propose a new framework, EasyScale, that aims to bridge the current gap between emulation testbed users and large-scale security experiments possibly using multiple scaling techniques. Our results from distributed denial of service and worm attack experiments demonstrate that EasyScale can easily allocate testbed resources to the critical components in an experiment, lowering the barrier for testbed users to conduct high fidelity yet scalable network security experiments. I.
unknown title
, 2012
"... MobiTest: An evaluation infrastructure for mobile distributed applications by ..."
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MobiTest: An evaluation infrastructure for mobile distributed applications by
Evaluation of Open-source Software Frameworks for High Fidelity Simulation of Cognitive Radio Networks
"... Abstract—High fidelity simulation of cognitive radio networks (CRN) requires a CRN software framework with librairies of components at all layers of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model (e.g. modulation schemes, protocols, routing algo-rithms) along with realistic channel models for simulati ..."
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Abstract—High fidelity simulation of cognitive radio networks (CRN) requires a CRN software framework with librairies of components at all layers of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model (e.g. modulation schemes, protocols, routing algo-rithms) along with realistic channel models for simulating a high number of nodes. At the same time, the CRN software framework should provide interfaces with hardware platforms for testbed evaluation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL). Unfortunately, there is no such software framework in the research community. This paper studies the combination of some open-source frameworks for high fidelity simulation of CRN. In particular, some challenges are highlighted for the combination of radio simulators (e.g. GNU Radio, CogWave) and network simulators (e.g. OMNeT++, ns-3) at the level of network layer, data link layer and physical layer. Based on this evaluation, new extensions to the CogWave open-source software framework are proposed for high fidelity simulation of CRN.
