EMPOWER: A Scalable Framework for Network Emulation

The development and implementation of new network protocols and applications need accurate, scalable, reconfigurable, and inexpensive tools for debugging, testing, performance tuning and evaluation purposes. Network emulation provides a fully controllable laboratory network environment in which protocols and applications can be evaluated against predefined network conditions and traffic dynamics. In this paper, we present a new framework of network emulation EMPOWER. EMPOWER is capable of generating a decent network model based on the information of an emulated network, and then mapping the model to an emulation configuration in the EMPOWER laboratory network environment. It is highly scalable not only because the number of emulator nodes may be increased without significantly increasing the emulation time or worrying about parallel simulation, but also because the network mapping scheme allows flexible ports aggregation and derivation. By dynamically configuring a virtual device, effects such as link bandwidth, packet delay, packet loss rate, and out-of-order delivery, can be emulated.