Network Emulation with the NS Simulator

What is Emulation?

Emulation refers to the ability to introduce the simulator into a live network. Special objects within the simulator are capable of introducing live traffic into the simulator and injecting traffic from the simulator into the live network. There are two primary types of uses for such a facility, depending on whether the simulator appears to end stations as a router or as another end station. In the first case, live traffic can pass through the simulator (transparently to endpoints) and be affected by objects within the simulation, or by other traffic on the live network. In the second case, the simulator can include traffic sources or sinks that communicate with real-world entities. The first type of use is currently more developed than the second type.

The rest of this page follows closely to the NS Notes and Documentation. Please see this reference for programming details on how to construct your own emulations. Examples scripts are provided in ~ns/emulate/.

Introduction

The emulation facility can be subdivided into two modes: In opaque mode, the simulator treats network data as uninterpreted packets. In particular, real-world protocol fields are not directly manipulated by the simulator. In opaque mode, live data packets may be dropped, delayed, re-ordered, or duplicated, but because no protocol processing is performed, protocol-specific traffic manipulation scenarios (e.g. ``drop the TCP segment containing a retransmission of sequence number 23045'') may not be performed. In protocol mode, the simulator is able to interpret and/or generate live network traffic containing arbitrary field assignments.

The interface between the simulator and live network is provided by a collection of objects including tap agents and network objects. Tap agents embed live network data into simulated packets and vice-versa. Network objects are installed in tap agents and provide an entry point for the sending and receipt of live data. Figure 1 illustrates how these objects are used for emulation. Both objects are described in the following sections.
Emulator Objects
Figure 1: Interaction of emulator objects with the simulator

When using the emulation mode, a special version of the system scheduler is used: the RealTime scheduler. This scheduler uses the same underlying structure as the standard calendar-queue based scheduler, but ties the execution of events to real-time.

Examples for using Emulation

Opaque Mode

Protocol Mode
Opaque Mode Protocol Mode
Figure 2: Packets are passed through the simulator without being interpreted Figure 3: Packets are generated by a TCP agent that interacts transparently with a real-world TCP server.
The simulator acts like a router allowing real-world traffic to be passed through without being manipulated. The ns packet contain a pointer to the network packet. Network packets may be dropped, delayed, re-ordered or duplicated by the simulator. Opaque mode is useful in evaluating the behavior of real-world implementations when subjected to adverse network conditions that are not protocol specific. The simulator is used as an end-point to generate TCP traffic. A TCP agent within ns interacts with a real-world TCP server and can receive data from the external application. nse allow supports ICMP, ARP and TCP NAT agents. The protocol mode can be used for end to end application testing, protocol and conformance testing.

Real-Time Scheduler

The real-time scheduler implements a soft real-time scheduler which ties event execution within the simulator to real time. Provided sufficient CPU horsepower is available to keep up with arriving packets, the simulator virtual time should closely track real-time. If the simulator becomes too slow to keep up with elapsing real time, a warning is continually produced if the skew exceeds a pre-specified constant ``slop factor'' (currently 10ms).

Tap Agents

The class TapAgent is a simple class derived from the base Agent class. As such, it is able to generate simulator packets containing arbitrarily-assigned values within the ns common header. The tap agent handles the setting of the common header packet size field and the type field. It uses the packet type PT_LIVE for packets injected into the simulator. Each tap agent can have at most one associated network object, although more than one tap agent may be instantiated on a single simulator node.

Network Objects

Network objects provide access to a live network (or to a trace file of captured network packets). There are several forms of network objects, depending on the protocol layer specified for access to the underlying network, in addition to the facilities provided by the host operating system. Use of some network objects requires special access privileges where noted. Generally, network objects provide an entrypoint into the live network at a particular protocol layer (e.g. link, raw IP, UDP, etc) and with a particular access mode (read-only, write-only, or read-write). Some network objects provide specialized facilities such as filtering or promiscuous access (i.e. the pcap/bpf network object) or group membership (i.e. UDP/IP multicast). The C++ class Network is provided as a base class from which specific network objects are derived. Three network objects are currently supported: pcap/bpf, raw IP, and UDP/IP. Each are described below.

Pcap/BPF Network Objects

These objects provide an extended interface to the LBNL packet capture library (libpcap). The pcap library is available from LBNL here. This library provides the ability to capture link-layer frames in a promiscuous fashion from network interface drivers (i.e. a copy is made for those programs making use of libpcap). It also provides the ability to read and write packet trace files in the ``tcpdump'' format. The extended interface provided by ns also allows for writing frames out to the network interface driver, provided the driver itself allows this action. Use of the library to capture or create live traffic may be protected; one generally requires at least read access to the system's packet filter facility which may need to be arranged through a system administrator.

The packet capture library works on several UNIX-based platforms. It is optimized for use with the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) and provides a filter compiler for the BPF pseudomachine machine code. On most systems supporting it, a kernel-resident BPF implementation processes the filter code, and applies the resulting pattern matching instructions to received frames. Those frames matching the patterns are received through the BPF machinery; those not matching the pattern are otherwise unaffected. BPF also supports sending link-layer frames. This is generally not suggested, as an entire properly-formatted frame must be created prior to handing it off to BPF. This may be problematic with respect to assigning proper link-layer headers for next-hop destinations. It is generally preferable to use the raw IP network object for sending IP packets, as the system's routing function will be used to determine proper link-layer encapsulating headers.

Pcap/File Network Objects

These objects are similar to the Pcap/BPF objects, except that network data is taken from a trace file rather than the live network. As such, the notion of promiscuous mode and the naming of a particular interface (available to the BPF objects) are not available for the file objects. In addition, the ability to create trace files is still under development. This facility will provide the ability to create tcpdump-compatible trace files.

IP Network Objects

These objects provide raw access to the IP protocol, and allow the complete specification of IP packets (including header). The implementation makes use of a raw socket. In most UNIX systems, access to such sockets requires super-user privileges. In addition, the interface to raw sockets is somewhat less standard than other types of sockets. The class Network/IP provides raw IP functionality plus a base class from which other network objects implementing higher-layer protocols are derived.

UDP/IP Network Objects

These objects provide access to the system's UDP implementation along with support for IP multicast group membership operations. IN PROGRESS.

Related Work and Papers on Network Emulation