Direct Code Execution: Revisiting Library OS Architecture for Reproducible Network Experiments

International audienceWe describe the first capability, to our knowledge, to execute nearly unmodified applications and Linux kernel code in the context of a widely-used open source discrete event networking simulator (ns-3). We propose Direct Code Execution (DCE), a framework that dramatically increases the number of available protocol models and realism available for ns-3 simulations. DCE meets the goals recently proposed for fully reproducible networking research and runnable papers, with the added benefits of 1) the ability of completely deterministic reproducibility, 2) the scalability that simulation time dilation offers, 3) capabilities supporting automated code coverage analysis, and 4) improved debuggability via execution within a single address space. In this paper, we describe in detail DCE, report on packet processing benchmark and showcase key features of the framework with different use cases. Next, we reproduce a previously published Multipath TCP (MPTCP) experiment and highlight how code coverage testing can be automated by showing results achieving 55-86% coverage of the MPTCP implementation. Then we demonstrate how network stack debugging can be easily performed and reproduced across a distributed system. Our first benchmarks are promising and we believe this framework can benefit the network community by enabling realistic, reproducible experiments and runnable papers