Design and implementation of a network performance analysis system for space network emulation platforms

Emulation platforms are critical for evaluation and verification in the research of networking technologies and protocols for space networks (SN). High fidelity emulating technologies have been extensively studied for SN in earlier work, while little emphasis has been placed on the performance evaluation part. In this paper, the design of a network performance analysis architecture is presented, with which high-speed network traffic can be captured and indexed, and the performance of the emulated SN can be well analyzed and evaluated. This architecture comprises three components, namely capture layer, storage layer and analysis layer. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and several analysis methods are adopted to evaluate the network performance comprehensively. In the implementation of the proposed architecture, configuration optimization and parallel processing are applied to handle large amount of high-speed network traffic. Finally, experiment results through the analysis system exhibits the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.