Performance Evaluation of the ROSENET Network Emulation System

Network emulation has been widely used to aid in the development and evaluation of real time applications. Traditional emulation tools based on a single node machine or a cluster of machines cannot satisfy today´s requirements for testing real time applications distributed over wide area networks. ROSENET is a novel network emulation system that exploits a remote high fidelity simulation to provide scale and accuracy for a low fidelity emulator serving a locally executing real time application. The distributed emulators and simulators in the ROSENET system coordinate by periodically updating their simulation/emulation status using network models. We evaluate the performance of an implementation of ROSENET using the NIST Net emulator and GTNetS simulator. Results show that ROSENET provides a promising approach to network emulation supporting accuracy and scale while meeting real-time constraints. We also illustrate the procedures using ROSENET to evaluate a contemporary real-time distributed application Skype and present experimental results.