R O M A TRE Universita` degli Studi di Roma Tre Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione Via della Vasca Navale, 79 – 00146 Roma, Italy DIA Emulation of Computer Networks with Netkit Massimo Rimondini1 RT-DIA-113-2007 January 2007 (1) Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, Universit`adi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy.
[email protected] Work partially supported by European Commission – Fet Open project DELIS – Dynamically Evolving Large Scale Information Systems – Contract no 001907 and by MIUR under Project “MAINSTREAM: Algoritmi per strutture informative di grandi dimensioni e data streams”, MIUR Programmi di ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale. ABSTRACT An emulator is a software or hardware environment that is capable of closely reproducing the func- tionalities of a real world system. Emulators, especially if implemented in software, are very useful for performing experiments that might compromise the operation of the target system or simply when the real system itself is not available. This is true in particular for computer networks, where configurations of network devices often need to be tested before being deployed. In this paper we present a survey of network emulation systems and we describe in detail Netkit, a lightweight emulator based on User-Mode Linux. Besides being an effective instrument to support teaching of computer networks, Netkit has also proven itself to be helpful in testing the configuration of large scale real world networks. Netkit provides tools for a straightforward setup of complex network scenarios that can be easily distributed and comes with a set of ready to use experiences that permit to immediately experiment with specific case studies.