NeST: Network Stack Tester

Abstract

Linux network namespaces are a cost-effective and scalable alternative to physical systems for the design and experimental evaluation of network protocols. These evaluations are required for a practical understanding of how various networking algorithms would perform in the real world. However, manually setting up testbeds and obtaining results in the desired format using network namespaces can be quite cumbersome and error-prone. Although writing scripts could make these tasks easier, it becomes tedious and impractical if the network under consideration is large and complex. In this paper, we propose a python based package called NeST (Network Stack Tester) to perform tests for different congestion control algorithms and queue disciplines. It uses Linux network namespaces and provides APIs to create complex emulated networks, run tests and extract the statistics using iproute2 and netperf in a single python script. We validate the results obtained from NeST against those obtained from a physical testbed, and a virtual testbed setup manually by using network namespaces. The experiments with NeST are easy to reproduce because it is a wrapper around the existing tools and does not introduce new system dependencies. © 2020 ACM.