CombNE: A Combined Network Emulator based on Programmable Switch

Network emulator is an equipment used in the field of computer networking to replicate and simulate real-world network conditions, especially poor-quality network conditions accompanied by various damages, in a controlled environment. It plays a crucial role in the development, testing, and validation of various new network-related technologies, protocols, and applications. Compared with simulation and test-bed methods, network emulation possesses the advantages of accuracy and cost-efficiency. However, legacy network emulation methods are implemented serially, which are typically restricted in efficiency and waste computing resources. In this paper, we propose a combined network emulator, CombNE. To implement this emulator, we consider P4 programmable switches as a desirable option. CombNE consists of three logical components. First, CombNE provides a policy specification scheme to intuitively describe operator’s intents. Secondly, the CombNE parallelizer intelligently identifies the dependencies between network damages, automatically determines parallelization and generates a combination strategy. Third, CombNE will generate optimized P4 files and flow table information based on the combination strategy and deploy them to P4 programmable switches. Finally, we evaluated the performance and resources of CombNE.