An Extensible Emulation and Network Performance Analysis System for Space Information Network

Due to the development of the SIN (Space Information Network) and its characteristics which lead to scenarios that could not be encountered in terrestrial network, large-scale emulation and experimental verification are urgently needed. Various kinds of network simulation methods exist for SIN but are generally lack of flexibility (e.g. real network emulation) or accuracy (e.g. OPNET, NS and etc.). In previous works, we had presented a laboratory scale platform, based on SDN (Software Defined Networking) and virtualization technologies, to conduct credible research and testing on SIN. In this paper, we describe a distributed and extensible architecture on the basis of the original platform and use Docker to reduce the need of computing resources. Then, we construct a Spark-based network analysis system which supports capturing network traffic and analyzing network performance for different emulation scenarios among our platform. Experiments demonstrate that the platform performs well for the emulation of SIN and the analysis system can analyze network performance efficiently.