A Hybrid Virtualization Approach to Emulate Heterogeneous Network Nodes

In the last decade, various resource virtualization technologies have been widely applied in ICT industry, particularly the cloud computing domain. These virtualization technologies can squeeze out hardware potential and consequently can save expenditure. Virtualization technologies are used in the network emulation domain to emulate network nodes, which could be quite heterogeneous in terms of hardware architecture. Currently, many network emulators utilize x86 based virtual machines (VMs) to emulate target network nodes of heterogeneous architectures, i.e. ARM, SPARC, PPC, etc., which may introduce incompatibility to the original system and application software of the target nodes, and will consequently jeopardize the emulation fidelity. This paper focuses on alleviating the emulation incompatibility caused by node heterogeneity. Firstly, this emulation incompatibility problem is investigated and analyzed. Then, a hybrid virtualization approach to emulate heterogeneous nodes is elaborated and implemented in a cloud-based network emulation system. A case study of applying the proposed approach to emulate a space-ground integrated network (SGIN) is conducted. Functional verification and performance evaluation experiments lead to the results, which show the hybrid approach can effectively dispose of the incompatibility problem with an affordable performance degradation.