A Real-subnet-in-the-loop Network Emulation Method Based On QualNet

Network emulation as a network testing method by considering the real communication devices together with a network simulator has been widely utilized for performance analysis of large scale networks owing to more accurate testing results compared to the results of pure software simulations.Recently,a lot of network emulators are investigated for the cases of one-to-one mapping and one-to-many mapping.In the case of one-to-one mapping,only one real communication device can be mapped to a single virtual node.With the aids of protocol parsing,a real communication network can be integrated with the network simulator.However,it is important to point out that network protocol parsing between real and virtual networks can only be performed with the knowledge of their network protocols.In the case of unknown network protocols,e.g.,military radios,all the above previous methods are invalid any more.In this thesis,a subnet-in-the-loop network emulation method is proposed based on QualNet.And a real-subnet-in-the-loop-interface(RSILI)is designed and realized for the method.With the constructed real-virtual gateway mapping table instead of protocol parsing,the packets of real and virtual networks can be delivered to each other.Finally,lots of qualitative tests and quantitative tests are conducted to test the efficiency of the RSILI.Simulation results demonstrated that with the proposed method a real network regardless of protocol can collaborate with the virtual network simulator for co-simulation with a acceptable delay from the RSILI.