Fidelity-aware Distributed Network Emulation

The design and development of new network protocols, architectures, and technologies require an evaluation phase where the researcher must provide empirical evidence for the performance of their contributions. In this context, network emulation has proven to be an attractive approach as it offers more flexibility compared to traditional testing platforms, and more realism compared to simulation software. However, as emulation requires running multiple concurrent virtual network components on a limited amount of resources, it faces well-documented limitations in its scalability and accuracy. Our work is an attempt to address these issues by theorising the concept of emulation fidelity and developing a framework for its monitoring through passive measurement of emulated packet delays. The preliminary evaluation shows promising results and demonstrates the high potential of our approach.