ERRANT: Realistic emulation of radio access networks.

Mobile devices drastically changed how people use the Internet. We use smartphones to access a heterogeneous catalog of web services such as news, social networks, audio/video streaming. Differently from wired connections, mobile networks do not offer the same kind of performance stability yet. Thus, service providers have to handle different network scenarios, e.g., 3G or 4G, while promising good end-users’ quality of experience (QoE). To ensure that QoE is adequate, it is necessary to thoroughly test applications with a wide range of possible network conditions. For this, network emulation is of vital importance as it allows a tester to run experiments with a wide range of network conditions. However, when it comes to mobile networks, the variety of technical characteristics, coupled with the opaque network configurations, makes realistic emulation a challenging task. Most of the freely available emulation tools rely on a simple emulation, offering limited variability performances for each network condition.