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.