On Using an Emulative Middleware to Model Wireless Networks: Simulation Results and Validation

Setting up and using realistic wide area testbeds for developing and testing large-scaled distributed applications and communication mechanisms may be very expensive. Therefore, designers use simulative technologies to obtain elastic and reproducible frameworks where those experiments may be safely carried out in local lab-based environments. Conventional simulators are based on the idea that the model of the real system must be completely simulated. In contrast with this idea, most recent simulation technologies say that not all entities should be simulated, but some should be real. That is, the simulation experiments must not be confined to isolated simulation worlds but have to embrace also emulation scenarios with real operational network devices. By exploiting this idea, we have designed and developed a simulative platform for networked applications (called Interceptor), where an emulation interface has been developed both to integrate into the simulation real network communication traffic, coming from different networked end-systems, and to incorporate into the simulation environment entire communication protocol layers, without the need of specifying them into the simulation model. In this paper we present the architecture of Interceptor and discuss some relevant examples of wireless simulation modeling using our emulation-based approach.