EMPOWER: a network emulator for wireline and wireless networks

The increasing need of protocol development environments and network performance evaluation tools gives rise to the research of flexible, scalable, and accurate network emulators. The desired network emulator should be able to facilitate the emulation of either wireline or wireless networks. In the case when network topology is critical to the underlying network protocol, the emulator should provide specific mechanisms to emulate network topology. In this paper, we present a distributed network emulation system EMPOWER, which not only can fulfill those requirements, but also can generate user-defined network conditions and traffic dynamics at packet level. EMPOWER is highly scalable in that each emulator node could be configured to emulate multiple network nodes. Some significant research issues such as topology mapping scheme and scalability of the emulator are discussed and addressed. Preliminary emulation results show that EMPOWER is capable of assisting the study of both wireless and wireline network protocols and applications.