Evaluation of a Wireless Transport Network Emulator Used for SDN Applications Development

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm that emerged in the networking industry recently. Many standardization activities are still ongoing and having the right tools to support these efforts is important. The Wireless Transport Emulator (WTE) was designed and implemented for supporting the standardization endeavors of the Wireless Transport Project, part of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). WTE uses different technologies in order to simulate a wireless transport network, consisting of emulated Network Elements, that expose two information models proposed by ONF: the Microwave Information Model, TR-532, and the Core Information Model, TR-512. The tool is also extremely useful for SDN application developers that want to create applications using the aforementioned information models, because it eliminates their need of owning real, expensive, wireless transport devices in order to test the functionality that they are developing. This paper describes the architecture of the WTE and then evaluates the simulator with regards to some characteristics. Based on the measurements, conclusions about the capabilities of the simulator are drawn.