Network Emulation as a Service (NEaaS): Towards a Cloud-Based Network Emulation Platform

Network emulation is an essential method to test network architecture, protocol and application software during a network's entire life-cycle. Compared with simulation and test-bed methods, network emulation possesses the advantages of accuracy and cost-efficiency. However, legacy network emulators are typically restricted in scalability, agility, and extensibility, which builds barriers to prevent them from being widely used. In this paper, we introduce the currently prevalent cloud computing and the related technologies including resource virtualization, NFV (network functional virtualization), SDN (software-defined networking), traffic control and flow steering to the network emulation domain. We design and implement an innovative cloud-based network emulation platform, aiming at providing users Network Emulation as a Service (NEaaS), which can be conveniently deployed on both public and private clouds. In order to emulate networks of much larger scale, and to reduce the hardware cost of the proposed platform, a representative light-weighted virtualization technology, namely Docker container is adopted as a supplement to virtual machine (VM) to emulate networking nodes in a hybrid manner. We carried out a comprehensive performance evaluation with in-depth discussions for this emulation platform. It turns out, our platform can significantly outperform legacy network emulators regarding to scalability, agility, and extensibility in large scale emulation scenarios, with much lower costs. Finally, a case study of applying the proposed platform to emulate a typical space-ground integrated network (SGIN) is given, which illustrates the platform's effectivity and efficiency.