EmuEdge: A Hybrid Emulator for Reproducible and Realistic Edge Computing Experiments

Numerous recent research efforts have been devoted to edge computing due to its key role in supporting emerging IoT applications. Prior to deploying edge technologies to real- world environments, they need to be adequately tested, tuned and validated. However, to our best knowledge, a testing platform for edge computing that provides both networking and computing realism at low cost is still missing. In this paper, we present EmuEdge, a hybrid emulator based on Linux netns and Xen for full-stack edge computing emulation. Supporting both container and VM, EmuEdge is the first edge computing emulator that takes advantage of both OS level and system level virtualization. Meanwhile, EmuEdge provides interfaces to integrate with both simulators and testbeds. The hybrid design provides on-demand realism on both networking and computing plane while ensuring emulation scalability. Moreover, it supports network replay and can be configured with an easy-to-use configuration tool. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that EmuEdge provides more realistic computation isolation and higher network fidelity than the state-of-the-art solutions.