Virtualization toolset for emulating mobile devices and networks

Abstract

With the ubiquitous usage of mobile devices, most communications are now impacted by the users' mobility. Therefore, applications and services must be designed to cope with network dynamics produced by those mobility patterns. Software research and development would benefit from taking device mobility into account. However, implementing and testing software on real devices is costly and cumbersome to perform. Virtualization is a widely used technique for avoiding these issues. In this paper, we propose three tools for creating and managing networks with mobile devices. Both network devices and user devices are emulated, the latter by using the QEMU system emulator. We implemented a virtual network device that can emulate access points and wireless interfaces, a real-time mobility engine that controls the dynamics of the connections and a control and management tool. Our toolset, called NEmu, can create both infrastructure and adhoc virtual networks for testing and evaluating applications with a fine-grained control over the network topology and link parameters. Results show that NEmu gives similar results as container-based virtualization and discrete event-based simulation.