A Network Emulator on the NetFPGA Platform

Network emulators play an important role when researchers want to evaluate the performance of newly designed protocols or network mechanisms instead of deploying them in real networks, because network emulators can provide appropriate network situations, (for example, delay, bottleneck bandwidth and packet loss) needed for experiments through easy control ‘knobs’. In this paper, we have implemented a network emulator on the NetFPGA platform that support exact emulation functions by hardware-accelerated packet processing. We show the pipeline architecture of the NetFPGA emulator and explain its component function. Through various performance experiments, we show that the NetFPGA network emulator has more accurate emulation performance compared to softwarebased network emulators such as the Dummynet [1] and the NISTnet [2]. KeywordsNetwork Emulator, NetFPGA Platform, emulation performance