Delay-based Fidelity Monitoring of Distributed Network Emulation

Distributed Network emulators (e.g., Mininet Cluster Edition) have proven to be an attractive solution to perform extreme-scale network and systems evaluation on smaller-size testbeds and experiment platforms. They can provide contained, customisable, and scalable testing environments for researchers to evaluate their contributions and reproduce their results. The major drawback of this approach in network experimentation is the use of virtual components (hosts, network switches, etc.) that do not behave with perfect similarity to the physical components they emulate, mainly due to the concurrency in using the underlay network and computing resources. We thus present in this paper a methodology to monitor emulation fidelity by measuring the network delays of emulated packets, which relies on statistical metrics to evaluate their inaccuracy. We further dig into the possible sources of emulation inaccuracy and show how our system can detect them to avoid biased experiment results. We particularly show through a common experiment scenario how undetected network emulation errors can lead to biased results.