MiniWorld: Resource-aware Distributed Network Emulation Via Full Virtualization

In this paper, we present MiniWorld, a novel distributed network emulator. It is based on full virtualization using QEMU/KVM, offers three network backends for emulating both wired and wireless communication, and provides several mobility patterns as well as distance-based link quality models. A snapshot boot mode is offered for accelerated booting of identical environments and repeating emulation runs. To decrease runtimes, MiniWorld supports distributed emulation across multiple computers, based on a resource-aware virtual machine (VM) scheduler. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of MiniWorld with respect to VM boot times, network bandwidth, round trip times, and topology switching times.