Emulation of Large-Scale LTE Networks in NS-3 and CORE: A Distributed Approach

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a promising technology to be used for Mission-Critical Networks (MCNs); emulating such technology is important to test different scenarios before real deployment. However, using the Network Simulator (NS-3) to simulate large-scale LTE networks has proven to be very time consuming. Hence, there is a need to speed up such simulations in order to facilitate real-time emulation and interaction of large-scale LTE networks with external systems. In this paper, we propose a new approach to enable the emulation of large-scale LTE networks by employing distributed topologies along with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol. The proposed approach is integrated with the Common Open Research Emulator (CORE) to enable exchange of real-time traffic between the simulated LTE network and Hardware-In-the Loop (HIL). Performance studies were carried out to evaluate the scaling performance of emulated LTE networks in real time. The results show that distributed implementation succeeds in running scenarios within the wall-clock time.