A Real-time Network Emulator: ADLARS Case Study

As testing and benchmarking performance of web services and networked applications has proven to be cost-effective, and crucial in some applications, increased significance has been attached to the development of hardware and software network emulators and simulators. In this paper, we discuss a possible design of a light-w eight real-time IP network emulator that can provide the same functionality and performance as hardware simulators. Also, as the systematic software engineering discipline has become a necessity in the software development life-cycle, we present a possible approach, utilizing mature software engineering disciplines, for building the software architecture of the emulator. We then use ADLARS [1], an A rchitecture D escription Language for Real-time Systems developed within our research team to describe the architecture. The emulator’s architecture serves as a good test-bed for our ADL because of its real-time and concurrent nature. We conclude by testing our design and presenting a possible JAVA instantiation of the emulator over a UNIX system.