Realistic Emulation of LTE With MoonGen and DPDK
Lars Stratmann, Brenton D. Walker, Vu Anh Vu · 2020
We present a realistic LTE link emulator built using the MoonGen and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) packet processing tools. This allows users to perform experiments involving emulated LTE links with configurable properties on a wired testbed such as Emulab. The emulator emulates heterogeneous uplink and downlink rates, latencies, packet loss, concealed loss recovery (Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request - HARQ), and the full set of Discontinuous Reception (DRX) states. We describe the implementation of the emulator, evaluate its performance compared to measurements made on a real LTE network, and highlight the technical challenges and trade-offs involved.