Work in Progress: TUNIE: A Large Scale Emulation Testbed for DTN Protocol Evaluation Based on Network Virtualization

In order to provide communication services in Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) where it lacks of end-to-end paths between the communication sources and destinations, a variety of routing schemes have been proposed. Consequently, the DTN research community needs a credible, flexible and large scale platform to accurately evaluate their performance. Existing simulation tools and wildlife testbeds have drawbacks of either unrealistic DTN environment or not being available for each researcher in terms of large monetary and time investment. In this paper, we propose TUNIE, a large scale emulation testbed for DTN protocol evaluation based on network virtualization. TUNIE is a realistic DTN protocol evaluation environment composing real applications and network nodes with high credibility, flexible controlling, abundant choices and supporting large scale experiments. TUNIE uses virtualization and OpenFlow technologies to generate virtual DTN nodes and simulate the opportunistic links depending on different mobility scenarios of random mobility, human or vehicular mobility trace.