The impact of loss generation on emulation-based protocol evaluation
Johan Garcia, Stefan Alfredsson, Anna Brunström · 2006
Network emulation has for a long time been an important tool for evaluating the performance of communication pro-tocols. By emulating network characteristics, such as re-stricted bandwidth, delay and losses, knowledge about the behavior and performance of actual protocol implementa-tions can be obtained. This paper focuses on the gener-ation of losses in network emulators and shows the ben-ecial effects of being able to control the generation of losses in a precise way. Both the possibility to get addi-tional knowledge about a protocol implementations behav-ior, as well as statistical benets such as paired experiments are discussed. By extending the loss generation to also in-clude bit-error generation, in addition to packet losses, a ner level of abstraction is provided. Deterministic bit-error generation allows detailed and repeatable studies of bit-error sensitive protocol behavior. TCP and a loss differ-entiating variant of TCP is used to illustrate the utility of improved loss generation.