A Comprehensive Framework to Evaluate Wireless Networks in Simulation and Real Systems

A thorough performance evaluation of protocols and algorithms for (wireless) networks requires simulation and real-system experiments, as both of them provide individual benefits. Usually, this calls for two separate implementations: One tailored to a discrete-event simulator and a second designed to run on real hardware. Therefore, significant effort is required to implement the same mechanisms or protocols twice. To avoid this overhead, we propose a comprehensive framework based on DPDK and OMNeT ++, allowing to run simulations and real-system experiments from the very same codebase. Hence the best of both worlds is available: scalable scenarios and reproducibility when simulating, and realistic behavior and real-world performance metrics when running real-system experiments. Our evaluation of several representative real-world networking scenarios analyzes similarities between simulation and real-system results and discusses the framework qualitatively. Quantitative results indicate that the approach performs well, i.e., it allows even for productive deployment using the codebase later on, and results from both worlds are comparable.