Trace-Driven Network Path Emulation

This paper reports on on-going work where a trace-driven approach to network path emulation is investigated. Time stamped probe packets are sent along a network path whereby a probe packet trace can be generated. It basically contains the send times and the one-way delays/loss indications of the probe packets. Inside the emulator, the probe packet trace is used by a loss model and a delay model. These determine if a packet should be dropped or what the delay of the packet should be. Three loss models and three delay models are evaluated. For non-responsive UDP-based flows, the trace-driven loss and delay models that are found to perform best are those that determine loss and delay based on loss rates and delay distribution parameters calculated across the probe packet trace using a small gliding window. For adaptive TCP flows, none of the evaluated trace-driven models performs well. Instead, the Bernoulli loss model and an independent average delay model performs best.

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