A Flexible Platform for Hardware-Aware Network Experiments and a Case Study on Wireless Network Coding

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a general, flexible hardware-aware network platform which takes hardware processing behavior into consideration to accurately evaluate network performance. The platform adopts a network-hardware co-simulation which the NS-2 network simulator supervises the network-wide traffic flow and the SystemC hardware simulator simulates the underlying hardware processing in network nodes. In addition, as a case study, we implemented wireless all-to-all broadcasting with network coding on the platform. processing behavior during the algorithm execution and evaluate the overall performance of the algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that hardware processing has a significant impact on the algorithm performance and hence should be taken into consideration in the algorithm design. We expect that this hardware-aware platform will become a very useful tool for more accurate network simulations and optimal designs of processing-intensive applications.