The Impact of Loss Generation on Emulation-based Protocol Evaluation

Network emulation has for a long time been an important tool for evaluating the performance of communication protocols. By emulating network characteristics, such as restricted bandwidth, delay and losses, knowledge about the behavior and performance of actual protocol implementations can be obtained. This paper focuses on the generation of losses in network emulators and shows the beneficial effects of being able to control the generation of losses in a precise way. Both the possibility to get additional knowledge about a protocol implementations behavior, as well as statistical benefits such as paired experiments are discussed. By extending the loss generation to also include bit-error generation, in addition to packet losses, a finer level of abstraction is provided. Deterministic biterror generation allows detailed and repeatable studies of bit-error sensitive protocol behavior. TCP and a loss differentiating variant of TCP is used to illustrate the utility of improved loss generation.