Emulation of multipath solutions in heterogeneous wireless networks over Ns-3 Platform

Abstract

The increased availability of devices equipped with multiple wireless interfaces leads to consider multihoming as one of the key features of the next generation 5G networks. This paper discusses the emulation technique that integrates Linux Container and ns-3 network simulator to evaluate emerging multipath applications and protocols. The presented solution was utilized as an experimental platform to analyze the performance of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol in heterogeneous network environments, particularly wireless ones, such as WLAN and cellular networks. We tested the MPTCP in fixed and mobility scenarios, exploiting the ns-3 to provide multipath wireless connectivity. The obtained results show the protocol behaviour that might have been expected from the system under investigation. Thus, one could use the presented scheme to get emulation results with reasonable accuracy, as long as ns-3 follows up with external real-time events. We further discuss the main limitations of the described method, observed in large-scale scenarios.