A paper on network emulation was presented by Roberto Canonico (CINI-University of Napoli) on October 28, at the NGNM 2009 workshop in Venice, Italy.

The paper, "Link Multiplexing in a Xen-based Network Emulation System" was authored by Pasquale Di Gennaro, Roberto Bifulco and Roberto Canonico, (Universita' di Napoli Federico II).

Network emulation has gained wide interest in the community of network researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of new protocols and applications in controllable and realistic network scenarios. To ensure scalability, modern emulation systems rely on the use of virtualization techniques to create complex networked systems by means of the computational resources available in a cluster of computers. In the context of network emulation systems, link multiplexing is the problem of emulating multiple point-to-point connections on top of a single Ethernet link.

In the paper, the researchers present how link multiplexing is implemented in NEPTUNE, a Xen-based network emulation system developed at University of Napoli Federico II. They compare their technique with those adopted in other network emulation systems. They also present experimental results aimed at investigating the performance limits of their system and at providing researchers with useful insights into the faithfulness of emulated scenarios.

The paper acknowledges the support from the OneLab2 project.