Distributed Emulation of Shared Media Networks

Comparative performance measurements of distributed applications and network protocols require the availability of appropriate network environments. Network emulation approaches offer a flexible way to mimic the properties of a variety of networks. While there are several centralized and distributed emulation tools available that can mimic the behavior of point-to-point links, shared media communication can only be emulated by totally centralized tools so far. To permit the emulation of large-scale mixed network scenarios, the emulation of shared media networks has to be performed in a distributed way also. In this paper, we introduce several strategies to emulate shared media networks in a distributed fashion. For one promising approach, the distributed emulation of carrier sensing, we present a prototype implementation. Measurements show the applicability and limitations of our solution.