Wide Area Link Emulator 0.1

Wide Area Link Emulator enables you to set and test various parameters of a WAN access link (also known as a bottleneck link) before testing on a fully-functional network.

Any ISP has a high bandwidth LAN (of the order of tens of Mbps, e.g. Ethernet) and a WAN access link with relatively low speeds (of the order of a few Kbps to a few Mbps). To be able to evaluate the ISPs performance, actual tests will have to be conducted on a live, fully functional network. This would imply enabling certain features in communication equipment which could be detrimental to the proper functioning of a commissioned network. To address such a problem of being able to characterize/quantify the network operation in terms of its performance with respect to various parameters, a test-bed emulating the ISPs connectivity to the Internet would be an ideal solution.

An important factor in setting up such a test-bed, is emulating the WAN Access Link. Using complex hardware is costly. Such a link can however be easily implemented by emulating the scenario on popular physical technology such as Ethernet. By changing the TCP/IP stack on a Personal Computer, the rate at which packets are injected into the network can be controlled and other necessary features can easily be added.

WALE was implemented in 2 phases and the first version can emulated bandwidths up to 8Mbps and uses FIFO queues with drop-tail.

WALE v2 can emulate bandwidths of up to 80Mbps(a 10-fold improvement over version 1) due to the stripped down version of Micro-second resolution timer being used in the Linux kernel. WALE also implements differentiated services are recommended by IETF. A hash-based packet classifier is used to classify packets into one of 3 queues (Expedited Forwarding, Assured Forwarding and Best Effort). A simple priority scheduling has been implemented between the queues.

Version 2 has been implemented in the Generic Device Layer of the Linux Kernel. The kernel version is 2.2.19. WALE2 kernel patch can be downloaded here. An ncurses based front end has been implemented for setting and viewing various parameters of the bottleneck link.