A scalable network emulation architecture for space internetworking

This paper focuses on the way to develop a laboratory testing, measurement and analysis platforms for the fundamental problems with the information networks and their applications. The platform applies software defined network (SDN) and virtualization technologies for scalability, reconfigurability and flexibility. We successfully emulated large-scale scenarios at the laboratory scale platform by generating numerous virtual nodes in a server. The nodes' physical characteristics (such as CPU frequency, memory, operating system, etc.) and the link characteristics (rate, BER, delay, etc.) between any two nodes are considered so as to simulate the real space environment approximately. Emulation performances show that the proposed platform has a scalable network emulation architecture and can provide better approach to simulate a complex, dynamic and high precision network.