An Accurate Packet Loss Emulation on a DPDK-based Network Emulator

Abstract

A software-based network emulator is widely used for performance evaluation of communication software and protocols thanks to lower cost and higher extensibility compared with a hardware-based approach. However, NetEm, which is a popular software-based network emulator in Linux, suffers from inaccurate emulation capability on high speed networks. The DPDK-based network emulator (DEMU) is a promising tool to address this problem, but it does not support packet loss emulation. In this paper, we design and implement the Gilbert-Elliott packet loss model on DEMU. Through experiments of TCP performance on a 10 Gigabit network environment, we demonstrate that (1) the proposed method accurately controls the packet loss ratio and burstiness, and (2) the TCP offload engine mechanism can degrade packet loss accuracy. Consequently, the accuracy of DEMU is 305 times higher than that of NetEm for random packet loss emulation.