Cost-Effective Network Packet Manipulation and Error-Detection Device

Real-time multimedia communication applications like video conferencing and screen sharing tools are an integral part of our daily communications. These time-critical services are handled via the Internet, a packet-switched and essentially best-effort network, not explicitly designed for robust real-time communication. From a video conferencing service provider's perspective, network issues cause a lot of user complaints due to various reasons: lossy WLAN channels, poorly configured home routers, or crowded carrier-grade network address translation devices. All of these issues have in common that they are often time-variant and non-deterministic. Furthermore, the end-to-end transmission in these highly inhomogeneous networks often suffers from a mixture of more than one error source. To enable a detailed and impartial analysis of multimedia service quality, it is necessary to analyze packets in defective online scenarios and introduce a broadly similar error pattern in an otherwise stable lab network. In this paper, we present SEDER, a hardware-software design of a layer two transparent Ethernet bridge that can be used for two purposes: error detection and error recreation. Implemented on low-cost hardware, the bridge can be easily deployed anywhere to allow debugging, even at a user's site. It is possible to parameterize our bridge to imitate almost all possible network effects, including complex combinations of more than one effect. In addition, we present two case studies, firstly emphasizing the capabilities of SEDER and secondly showing the need to use SEDER to harden open source Video Conferencing Tools against errors.