Towards Virtual and Physical Nodes Fused Network Emulation

Network emulation is a vital testing and verification approach for networking protocols of all layers, as well as for application software during a network's entire life-cycle from designing to maintenance phases. Network emulation method combines the merits of simulation and test-bed, and balances cost and accuracy. This paper introduces a promising cloud-based network emulation platform, which leverages a set of novel virtualization and cloud related technologies to implement flexibility, agility and scalability in network emulation domain. Aiming at realizing high fidelity (HiFi) network emulation, External physical network nodes should be able to connect and communicate with the emulated nodes. This paper elaborates an innovative strategy to integrate outside physical nodes with virtual nodes inside of the emulation platform to implement virtual and physical nodes fused network emulation. Functional tests are carried out and indicate that the proposed strategy can effectively bridge the physical node to the virtual platform to achieve HiFi network emulation. Besides, performance evaluation also illustrates that the derived strategy can efficiently utilize the limited computation and networking resources of the platform so to achieve sufficient scalability and flexibility for the typical emulation scenarios.