Performance, Validation and Testing with the Network Simulation Cradle

Much current simulation of TCP makes use of simplified models of TCP, which is a large and complex protocol with many variations possible between implementations. We use direct execution of real world network stacks in the network simulator ns-2 to compare TCP performance between implementations and reproduce existing work. A project called The Network Simulation Cradle provides the real world network stacks and we show how it can be used for performance evaluation and validation. There are large differences in performance between simplified TCP models and TCP implementations in some situations. Such differences are apparent in some reproduced research, with results using the Network Simulation Cradle very different from the results produced with the ns-2 TCP models. In other cases, using the real implementations gives very similar results, validating the original research.