https://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/netbed-osdi02.pdf
Three experimental environments traditionally support network and distributed systems research: network emulators, network simulators, and live networks. The
continued use of multiple approaches highlights both the value and inadequacy of each . Netbed, a descendant of Emulab, provides an experimentation facility that integrates these approaches, allowing researchers to configure and access networks composed of …By providing operating system-like services, such as resource allocations and scheduling, and by virtualizing heterogeneous resources, Netbed acts as a virtual machine for network experimentation. This paper presents Netbed’s overall design and implementation and demonstrates its ability to improve experimental automation and efficiency. These, in turn, lead to new methods of experimentation, including …
Netbed’s framework provides integrated abstractions, services, and name space common to all three environments, mapping them into domain-specific mechanism and internal names. Netbed’s operating system like services include node and link allocation and naming, scheduling and idle experiment preemption, experiment “swapping”, and disk image loading.