WP4E - Emulation Component

University of Pisa

Architecture

The Emulation Component is a part of the work done by UniPi in the context of the EU OneLab project.

The purpose of this component is to emulate the behavior of a wired or a wireless link. It is based on an external device, called Dummynet box, sitting on the link between Nodes and the rest of the Internet.

• Each user can configure his own emulated link, regardless of the other user's experiments.
• A single dummynet box can serve the needs of multiples nodes.
• An experiment involves defining a delay profile and issuing the netconfig command in order to configure the link, then run the experiment on the client.

Implementation

• database extensions;
• a PLCAPI dummynetbox extension;
• a `netconfig' configuration tool.

The database extensions involves the Central Site database and only require few extra field to describe dummynetboxes and their additional link to the nodes. The PLCAPI extension allows to do basic operation with the dummynetboxes, and the `netconfig' tool allows the emulation box to be configured dynamically.

Conclusions

This Emulation Component was developed in the OneLab project.
Using this emulator, a OneLab user can set up and configure special network environment in order to perform experiments with user-configurable features, modeling the behavior of links of various type.

At the end of the project the main objectives was achieved, in particular:

• The PLCAPI dummynet box extensions are fully integrated with the OneLab project PLCAPI;
• the PLCAPI extension is already available on the private-onelab site;
• the Web interface and the dummynet box image are available as well;
• validation on the UniPi Central site was successfully performed.