Packet Reading for Network Emulation

Russell Bradford, Rob Simmonds, and Brian Unger. Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium on the Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'01), Cincinatti, Ohio.

Abstract: A network emulator, such as the Internet Protocol Traffic and Network Emulator (IP-TNE), enables real applications running on external hosts to interact with a virtual network modelled within the emulator. It combines a real-time network simulation engine with methods to capture specific packets from a network and write packets back to the network with customized headers.

This paper explains the reading and writing of packets. It explains which components can be implemented in a portable manor and which need to be implemented in different ways on different operating systems. Both kernel level and user level packet filtering are examined and performance results using gigabit Ethernet and various readers are presented.

Keywords: Network Emulation, Parallel Discrete Event Simulation, I/O Performance.