To infinity and beyond: time-warped network emulation

Abstract

The goal of this work is to subject unmodified applications running on commodity operating systems and stock hardware to network speeds orders of magnitude faster than available at any given point in time. This paper describes our approach to time dilation, atechnique to uniformly and accurately slow the passage of time from the perspective of an operating system by a specified factor. As a side effect, physical devices— including the network—appear relatively faster to both applications and operating systems. Both qualitative and statistical evaluations indicate our prototype implementation is accurate across several orders of magnitude. We demonstrate time dilation’s utility by conducting highbandwidth head-to-head TCP stack comparisons and application evaluation. 1