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Virtual Time Machine for Reproducible Network Emulation

Published: 29 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Reproducing network emulation experiments on diverse physical platforms with varying computation and communication resources is non-trivial. Many state-of-the-art network emulation testbeds do not guarantee timing fidelity. Consequently, results obtained from these testbeds can be misleading, especially when insufficient physical resources are provided to run the experiments. Reproducibility is far from being the norm. In this paper, we present a novel approach that can guarantee reproducible results for network emulation. Our system, called the Virtual Time Machine (VTM), takes advantage of both time dilation and carefully controlled scheduling of the virtual machines. Time dilation allows sufficiently scaled resources to run the experiments in virtual time, and controlled VM scheduling prescribes the precise timing of message passing for distributed applications---independent of the resource provisioning of the underlying physical testbed. Preliminary experiments show that VTM can guarantee reproducible results with varying time dilation, resource subscription, and VM scheduling scenarios.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Temporally synchronized emulation of devices with simulation of networksProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531020(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network EmulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/347886732:2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Emulating Software Defined Network using Mininet-ns3-WIFI Integration for Wireless NetworksWireless Personal Communications: An International Journal10.1007/s11277-020-08002-w118:1(75-92)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGSIM-PADS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation
May 2019
215 pages
ISBN:9781450367233
DOI:10.1145/3316480
  • General Chair:
  • Dong (Kevin) Jin,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Jason Liu,
  • Laxmikant V. Kale
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. network emulation
  2. network experiments
  3. reproducibility
  4. time dilation
  5. virtual machines

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  • Research-article

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  • DHS
  • NSF
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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SIGSIM-PADS '19
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SIGSIM-PADS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 25 submissions, 52%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 779 submissions, 51%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Temporally synchronized emulation of devices with simulation of networksProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3518997.3531020(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Mechanisms for Precise Virtual Time Advancement in Network EmulationACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/347886732:2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Emulating Software Defined Network using Mininet-ns3-WIFI Integration for Wireless NetworksWireless Personal Communications: An International Journal10.1007/s11277-020-08002-w118:1(75-92)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2021
  • (2020)Precise Virtual Time Advancement for Network EmulationProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/3384441.3395978(175-186)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020

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