The Architecture, Design, and Operation of a Virtual Network Hardware Emulation (VNHE) System

This paper presents an overview of the architecture, design, and operation of a virtual network hardware emulation system. The primary motivation for creating the system was to allow operating system development engineers to create virtual network based hardware devices, which allows the developers to create support software for the devices. The system also allows test engineers to test the devices virtually before the devices are physically manufactured and available. The virtual network hardware emulation system consists of seven primary software components, such as a WLan Virtual Miniport component, which simulate the behavior of their physical counterparts. The system is designed in a modular way which allows a wide range of network based hardware devices to be virtualized and tested.