A testbed environment for the performance evaluation of modular network architectures

We propose an original approach to evaluate the performance of network protocols and distributed applications. Our methodology is intermediate between the use of simulation techniques and the deployment of the code under test in a real system. It allows one to test protocols in real environments. At the same time, it allows easy prototyping and modification of the protocols; code modules can be easily combined into different protocol stacks. We describe our preliminary implementation of the testbed environment we propose, and we discuss the experimental results obtained by using the framework to measure the performance of QoS protocols.