A tool for emulating real network dynamics on a PC

RplTrc: A Tool for Emulating Real Network Dynamics for Performance Evaluation

RplTrc is a fully-fledged open source layer 3 network emulator that runs on top of GNU/Linux. RplTrc uses traces to drive interceptions of the Linux protocol stack to delay, drop or duplicate packets. The length of traces is not limited. Thus, unlike other well-known emulators such as NIST Net or the emulator module in the Linux 2.6 kernel, RplTrc is capable to account for important performance characteristics inherent to real networks such as long-range dependence and self-similarity of cross-traffic. Tests show that RplTrc installed on a commodity PC is capable to emulate a 100MBit/s or a lightly-loaded 1GBit/s network and has a precision in reproducing packet delays in the order of 100 microseconds. RplTrc thus enables extensive performance evaluation of distributed applications in lab environments.

News

RplTrc release 2.0 with support for Linux Kernel 2.6 is scheduled for July 2006.

Download

RplTrc 1.0: rpltrc.tar.gz

Traces

We have a large collection of traces that are eligible when employing RplTrc for performance evalution of distributed applications. This collection includes
- Traces captured in probing experiments with the ETH campus network
- Traces generated in OpNet and ns-2 simulations
- Traces generated with mathematical models

Support

We offer support for RplTrc. This supports includes

- setting up the emulator/installing the software
- evaluating the performance of your distributed application in our lab.
- providing guidelines on how you can conduct performance evaluations for your distributed application. These guidelines are based on our large experience with network measurements, network emulation and simulation.

Contact

For more information write to or . To facilitate the processing of requests, we kindly ask you to include following information in your e-mail: 1. affiliation - for industry: *organization / department / executive manager- for academia * name and URL of your institution * for students: name of advisor/professor in charge2. area of interest -field of research (e.g. VoIP, circuit emulation, wireless, mobile, ad hoc, ...) -for students this includes the working title of your Ph.D. or master's thesis

Publications

Rainer Baumann and Ulrich Fiedler. A tool for emulating real network dynamics on a PC. TIK Report 218, ETH Zurich. 2005
Rainer Baumann, Ulrich Fiedler, RplTrc: A Tool for Emulating Real Network Dynamics for Performance Evaluation, 9th International Conference on Telecommunications (ConTel'07), Zagreb, Croatia, June 2007 (PDF)