Flow-Based Network Emulator

FlowEmu is an open-source flow-based network emulator, which allows the user to model a communication system via freely connectable modules that implement different types of impairments, queues and departure processes. It comes with a Python toolchain that supports running experiments in a virtual Docker environment or on a hardware testbed. FlowEmu features a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) interface. Via these interfaces, the user can change the structure and parameters of the model at runtime and get real-time statistics.

The source code of FlowEmu is available under the GPLv3 license on GitHub.

Features

• Extendable set of freely connectable modules
• Written in C++
• Runs on Linux as a single user space process
• Access to Ethernet frames via raw sockets
• Python toolchain for running experiments
• Supports virtual Docker environments as well as hardware testbeds
• Web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) interface
• The structure and parameters of the model can be changed at runtime
• Real-time statistics
• Separate seedable pseudo random number generator for each module

Project Members

• Daniel Stolpmann

Publications

• FlowEmu: an open-source flow-based network emulator
  Stolpmann, Daniel; Timm-Giel, Andreas
  Electronic Communications of the EASST 80: 1-4 (2021)
  Open Access | Publisher DOI