PrimoGENI for hybrid network simulation and emulation experiments in GENI

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a community-driven research and development effort to build a collaborative and exploratory network experimentation platform—a ‘virtual laboratory’ for the design, implementation, and evaluation of future networks. The PrimoGENI project enables real-time network simulation by extending an existing network simulator to become part of the GENI federation to support large-scale experiments involving physical, simulated, and emulated network entities. In this paper, we describe a novel design of PrimoGENI, which aims at supporting realistic, scalable, and flexible network experiments with real-time simulation and emulation capabilities. We present a flexible emulation infrastructure that allows both remote client machines, local cluster nodes running virtual machines, and external networks to seamlessly interoperate with the simulated network running within a designated ‘slice’ of resources. We present the results of our preliminary validation and performance studies to demonstrate the capabilities as well as limitations of our approach.