Evaluation of Mininet-WiFi integration via ns-3

Abstract

Mininet is a Linux-based network emulator that is particularly widely used for Software Defined Network experiments, due to its in-built support for OpenFlow switches. However, Mininet currently lacks support for wireless links. A recent work has addressed this limitation by using the real-time feature of ns-3 to integrate the IEEE 802.11 channel emulation feature with Mininet, which we refer to as Mininet-ns3-WiFi. While this approach has great potential to serve as an experimental platform, in particular for Software Defined Wireless Networks, it has not been extensively evaluated in terms of experiment result accuracy and fidelity. This is critical for any system that integrates simulation with real-time components. In this paper, we present a detailed evaluation of the fidelity of experimental results of Mininet-ns3-WiFi. We further present a reliable and low cost method that gives an experimenter an indicator about the fidelity and trustworthiness of the results.