Integrated Multiprotocol Network Emulator/Simulator

General purpose IP network emulation/simulation tool for FreeBSD and Linux

We developed a realistic network topology emulation / simulation framework based on the FreeBSD and Linux operating system kernel partitioned into multiple lightweight virtual nodes, which can be interconnected via kernel-level links to form arbitrarily complex network topologies.

Main advantages:

• Real time IP network topology emulation / simulation at Gigabit speeds
• 100s to 1000s of virtual nodes on one physical machine, each node capable of running unmodified UNIX applications
• Scalable architecture for real-time large scale experiments
• GUI: management plane, automated node and link creation and configuration
• Lightweight, portable experiments which can be quickly and easily instantiated
• FreeBSD kernel-level network stack virtualization technology developed at the University of Zagreb
• Open source and free

Current applications:

• General-purpose network testbed used for Ericsson Nikola Tesla product testing
• Realistic laboratory and learning environments used for teaching at the University of Zagreb

Technologies used:

• jails, netgraph (FreeBSD)
• Docker (Linux)