alex-testlab / miniworld_core

Mobile Infrastructure'n'Network Integrated World

MiniWorld Core

Network emulation tool for wired and wireless networks.

Demo

A short demo shows 3 KVM OpenWRT nodes with B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced routing:

Another video shows the RandomWalk movement pattern.

About

MiniWorld (Mobile Infrastructure'n'Network Integrated World) enables network emulation in Linux.

Distributed applications, routing algorithms, etc. can be tested with MiniWorld.

For that purpose, the software-under-test has to be deployed in a KVM VM. Afterwards, the VMs can be interconnected by a network backend. For each connection, different static or event-based link-impairment can be applied. The network topology changes with a step.

Features

• Network emulation with Linux Bridges and VDE
  • Wired and wireless link emulation
  • Network Supervision
  • Differential Network Switching
• QEMU/KVM node virtualization
  • Copy on write (COW) for VM images
  • Snapshot boot mode to speed up similar emulation runs
  • Node provisioning via serial shell (no SSH required)
  • Emulate arbitrary system architectures with QEMU
  • Node RAM Disk and COW reduces Disk I/O
• Distributed mode based on ZeroMQ
  • GRE Tap tunnels to interconnect Emulation Servers
• Movement Patterns such as RandomWalk and CORE integration
• Basic Link Quality Models based on Linux HTB and netem

Get started

A special repository called MiniWorld Playground contains some example VM images and scenario files. For example you can play with the B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced routing algorithm (deployed in a lightweight OpenWRT VM image). You only need docker and docker-compose! Further reference is provided in the documentation section.

Documentation

Documentation is hosted on readthedocs. The API documentation introduces MiniWorld from a user perspective.

For more information about the technical details you should read the paper or even the master thesis (for a very detailed documentation).

• Master Thesis
• Paper: Link following if paper is published

Contribute

MiniWorld is an open-source project. Do you have some good ideas, improvements, or even want to get your hands dirty? There is a lot of work in the backlog and we can assign you small issues such that you can have a closer look at the source code. Do not hesitate to contact us at miniworldproject ät gmail.com !

Backlog

• Documentation
• More advanced scenario editor (currently: CORE)
• High-fidelity link-emulation (integrate with ns-3?)
• Android-based emulation with location (lat/lon) set via adb
• Lightweight virtualization for cases where full-system virt. is not needed
• Web UI