CDNET: A Content Delivery Network Emulator

Analyzing Content Delivery Network (CDN) systems’ performance can help the CDNs’ owners increase their benefits, improve the systems’ service quality, and reduce investment costs. To analyze caching systems, besides mathematical models, there are simulation-based methods, which are based on virtual environments to mimic the system behaviors, typically, such as CDN simulators and testbeds. But these simulators and testbeds have their limitations. In particular, simulators cannot guarantee the functional realism of service applications. Meanwhile, testbeds are cumbersome and inflexible to adapt to new topologies or caching strategies. In this work, we develop a CDN emulator, which is adaptive, flexible, high-fidelity, and reliable. To evaluate the reproducibility of experimental results, we also run our tools multiple configuration parameter sets and compare the results with a discrete event simulation. Our experiments show that our emulator is stable and works properly. The tool’s resource consumption is also evaluated.