Abhishek kumar Mishra, Sara Ayoubi, Giulio Grassi, Renata Teixeira
Abstract
This paper presents NemFi: a trace-driven WiFi emulator. NemFi is a record-and-replay emulator that captures traces representing real WiFi conditions, and later replay these traces to reproduce the same conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art emulator that was developed for cellular links cannot emulate WiFi conditions. We identify the three key differences that must be addressed to enable accurate WiFi record-and-replay: WiFi packet losses, medium-access control, and frame aggregation. We then extend the existing cellular network emulator to support WiFi record-and-replay. We evaluate the performance of NemFi via repeated experimentation across different WiFi conditions and for three different types of applications: speed-test, file download, and video streaming. Our experimental results demonstrate that average application performance over NemFi and real WiFi links is similar (with less than 3 percent difference).