PrimoGENI for hybrid network simulation and emulation experiments in GENI

Abstract

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a community-driven research and development effort to build a collaborative and exploratory network experimentation platform—a ‘virtual laboratory’ for the design, implementation, and evaluation of future networks. The PrimoGENI project enables real-time network simulation by extending an existing network simulator to become part of the GENI federation to support large-scale experiments involving physical, simulated, and emulated network entities. In this paper, we describe a novel design of PrimoGENI, which aims at supporting realistic, scalable, and flexible network experiments with real-time simulation and emulation capabilities. We present a flexible emulation infrastructure that allows both remote client machines, local cluster nodes running virtual machines, and external networks to seamlessly interoperate with the simulated network running within a designated ‘slice’ of resources. We present the results of our preliminary validation and performance studies to demonstrate the capabilities as well as limitations of our approach.

Keywords:

• network simulation
• emulation
• real-time simulation
• virtualization

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our undergraduate students, Eduardo Tibau and Eduardo Peña, for the development of slingshot. The PrimoGENI project is part of GENI's Spiral 2 prototyping and development effort, funded by the National Science Foundation through GENI Project Office (GPO). The PrimoGENI project is built on PRIME, which is also funded by NSF through the grant CNS-0836408.

Notes

1 The latest TAP device implementation prohibits writing IP packets to the kernel, possibly for security reasons. We choose to use a raw socket instead for the EDD to send IP packets.