Evaluation of delay performance of traffic shapers

In network emulation, traffic shapers are used to shape the performance of the network. They are provided with certain inputs in a test environment to vary the network performance accordingly in order to investigate the effects of different network conditions on applications in real yet emulated scenarios. However, it is very important for the shapers to work as supposed in order to successfully realize the desired network conditions. They may make the results of network emulations unrealistic and unreliable if their functioning is not according to the desired specification. In this work, we evaluate the delay shaping of three traffic shapers, NIST Net, Netem and KauNet through the results obtained from a number of experiments. A comparison of the output of their delay shaping is presented. This comparison can enable us to select the most suitable shaper based on the required shaping. Effects of hardware platforms on the shaping are also filtered out by performing the experiments with shapers installed on Advance Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel platforms separately. Different Protocol Data Unit (PDU) sizes are used in the experiments to test the influence of packet sizes on the shaping. These delay evaluation results are then complemented by the Coefficient of Throughput Variation (CoTV) results.