A Hybrid Virtualization Approach to Emulate Network Nodes of Heterogeneous Architectures

In the recent years, resource virtualization technologies of different types have been widely used in the ICT industry, particularly in cloud computing domain. These virtualization technologies can squeeze out hardware potential and consequently can significantly save CAPEX and OPEX. Virtualization technologies are adopted in network emulation to emulate heterogeneous nodes of target networks. At present, network emulators typically utilize legacy x86-based virtual machines (VMs) and light-weighted containers to emulate network nodes of heterogeneous architectures including ARM, SPARC, PPC, etc., which introduces software incompatibility to the original system software, protocols and applications, and may consequently jeopardize emulation fidelity. This paper focuses on mitigating the emulation incompatibility problem caused by node heterogeneity. Firstly, this problem is thoroughly investigated and analyzed on a cloud-based network emulation platform. Then, a hybrid virtualization approach concurrently utilizing multiple virtualization technologies, namely KVM, QEMU, and Docker to emulate heterogeneously architected nodes is derived and then implemented in the cloud-based network emulation platform. Functional verification and performance evaluation experiments have been carried out and have led to the conclusion that the elaborated hybrid virtualization approach can effectively dispose of the emulation incompatibility problem with affordable performance degradations. In addition, a case study of applying the hybrid virtualization approach to emulate a space-ground integrated network (SGIN) is conducted to show its effectivity and efficiency.