Kathará: A Lightweight Network Emulation System

In computer networks, tests to ensure the correct behaviour of network equipment or protocols are often required. Because of the high cost of physical hardware, these tests are always performed in a virtual environment. Kathará is a network emulation system which accurately reproduces the behaviour of a real system. It can exploit several virtualization technologies leveraging on its modularity. Lately, Kathará has been rewritten to overcome some implementation limitations and performance issues. This paper presents the Kathará model and its new architecture, demonstrating its value, comparing its scalability and performance with Netkit (another state-of-the-art tool for network emulation) and with the previous version of Kathará.