NETWORK TOOLS AND PROTOCOLS

Lab 4: Emulating WAN with NETEM II: Packet

Loss, Duplication, Reordering, and Corruption
Document Version: 06-14-2019

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Lab 4: Emulating WAN with NETEM II: Packet Loss, Duplication, Reordering, and Corruption

Contents

Overview ............................................................................................................................. 3
Objectives............................................................................................................................ 3
Lab settings ......................................................................................................................... 3
Lab roadmap ....................................................................................................................... 3
1 Introduction to network emulators and NETEM ........................................................ 3
2 Lab topology................................................................................................................ 5
2.1 Testing connectivity between two hosts ............................................................. 6
3 Adding/changing packet loss ...................................................................................... 7
3.1 Identify interface of host h1 and host h2............................................................. 8
3.2 Add packet loss to the interface connecting to the WAN ................................... 9
3.3 Restore default values........................................................................................ 12
3.4 Add correlation value for packet loss to interface connecting to WAN ............ 13
4 Adding packet corruption ......................................................................................... 14
4.1 Add packet corruption to an interface connected to the WAN ......................... 14
5 Add packet reordering .............................................................................................. 16
6 Add packet duplication ............................................................................................. 17
References ........................................................................................................................ 18

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Overview

This lab continues the description of NETEM and how to use it to emulate Wide Area
Networks (WANs). Besides delay, this lab focuses on other parameters such as packet loss,
packet duplication, reordering, and packet corruption. These parameters affect the
performance of protocols and networks.

Objectives

By the end of this lab, students should be able to:

1. Deploy emulated WANs characterized by parameters such as delay, packet loss,

packet corruption, packet reordering, and packet duplication.
2. Measure the performance of WANs characterized by different parameter values.
3. Visualize WAN performance measures.

Lab settings

The information in Table 1 provides the credentials of the machine containing Mininet.

Table 1. Credentials to access Client1 machine.

Device Account Password

Client1 admin password

Lab roadmap

This lab is organized as follows:

1. Section 1: Introduction to network emulators and NETEM.

2. Section 2: Lab topology.
3. Section 3: Adding/changing packet loss.
4. Section 4: Adding packet corruption.
5. Section 5: Adding packet reordering.
6. Section 6: Adding packet duplication.

1 Introduction to network emulators and NETEM

Part I of Emulating WAN with NETEM described how to use NETEM to emulate WANs
characterized by long delays. Part I also explained how the end-to-end delay can be

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Lab 4: Emulating WAN with NETEM II: Packet Loss, Duplication, Reordering, and Corruption

dominated by the WAN’s propagation delay and how the Round-Trip Time (RTT)
estimates this delay.

In addition to delay, many WANs and LANs are subject to packet loss, reordering,
corruption, and duplication.

Delay, Loss, Reordering, Duplication, Corruption

WAN

h1 h2

Figure 1. Parameters affecting throughput in a WAN.

The above situations are described follows:

1. Packet loss: a condition that occurs when a packet travelling across a network fails
to reach its destination. Packet loss may have a large impact on high-throughput
high-latency networks. A common cause of packet loss is the inability of routers
to hold packets arriving at a rate higher than the departure rate. Even in cases
where the high packet arrival rate is only temporary (e.g., short-term traffic
bursts), the router is limited by the amount of buffer memory used to momentarily
store packets. When packet loss occurs, TCP reduces the congestion window and
consequently the throughput by half. Packet loss must be mitigated by using best-
practice network designs, such as Science DMZ.

2. Packet reordering: a condition that occurs when packets are received in a different
order from which they were sent. Packet reordering, also known as out-of-order
packet delivery, is typically the result of packets following different routes to reach
their destination. Packet reordering may deteriorate the throughput of TCP
connections in high-throughput high-latency networks. For each segment
received out of order, a TCP receiver sends an acknowledgement (ACK) for the last
correctly received segment. Once the TCP sender receives three
acknowledgements for the same segment (triple duplicate ACK), the sender
considers that the receiver did not correctly receive the packet following the
packet that is being acknowledged three times. It then proceeds to reduce the
congestion window and throughput by half.

3. Packet corruption: corruption of bits comprising a packet may (mostly) occur at

the physical layer. Two adjacent devices are connected by a physical channel (e.g.,
fiber, twisted-pair copper wire, etc). The physical layer accepts a raw bit stream
and delivers it to the data-link layer. If corruption occurs, some bits may have
different values than those originally sent by the sender node. The receiver node
then simply discards the packet. As a result, the TCP sender process will not

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Lab 4: Emulating WAN with NETEM II: Packet Loss, Duplication, Reordering, and Corruption

receive an acknowledgement for the corresponding segment and will consider it

as a lost segment. The TCP sender process will subsequently decrease the
congestion window and throughput by half.

4. Packet duplication: a condition where multiple copies of a packet are present in

the network and received by the destination. Packet duplication is the result of
retransmissions, where a sender node retransmits unacknowledged (NACK)
packets.

Packet loss, reordering, and corruption (the last two are interpreted as packet loss also
by the TCP sender) lead to a drastic reduction of throughput. In this lab, we will use the
NETEM tool to emulate these situations affecting end-to-end performance.

2 Lab topology

Let’s get started with creating a simple Mininet topology using MiniEdit. The topology
uses 10.0.0.0/8 which is the default network assigned by Mininet.

Figure 2. Lab topology.

Step 1. A shortcut to MiniEdit is located on the machine’s Desktop. Start MiniEdit by

clicking on MiniEdit’s shortcut. When prompted for a password, type password .

Figure 3. MiniEdit shortcut.

Step 2. On MiniEdit’s menu bar, click on File then Open to load the lab’s topology. Locate
the Lab 4.mn topology file and click on Open.

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Figure 4. MiniEdit’s Open dialog.

Step 3. Before starting the measurements between host h1 and host h2, the network
must be started. Click on the Run button located at the bottom left of MiniEdit’s window
to start the emulation.

Figure 5. Running the emulation.

The above topology uses 10.0.0.0/8 which is the default network assigned by Mininet.

2.1 Testing connectivity between two hosts

Step 1. Hold the right-click on host h1 and select Terminal. This opens the terminal of
host h1 and allows the execution of commands on host h1.

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Figure 6. Opening a terminal on host h1.

Step 2. Test connectivity between the end-hosts using the ping command. On host h1,
type the command ping 10.0.0.2 . This command tests the connectivity between host
h1 and host h2. To stop the test, press Ctrl+c . The figure below shows a successful
connectivity test.

Figure 7. Connectivity test using ping command.

The figure above indicates that there is connectivity between host h1 and host h2. Thus,
we are ready to start the throughput measurement process.

3 Adding/changing packet loss

The user invokes NETEM using the command line utility called tc 4, 5. With no additional
parameters, NETEM behaves as a basic FIFO queue with no delay, loss, duplication, or
reordering of packets. The basic tc syntax used with NETEM is as follows:

sudo tc qdisc [add|del|replace|change|show] dev dev_id root netem opts

• sudo : enable the execution of the command with higher security privileges.
• tc : command used to interact with NETEM.
• qdisc : a queue discipline (qdisc) is a set of rules that determine the order in which
packets arriving from the IP protocol output are served. The queue discipline is
applied to a packet queue to decide when to send each packet.

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• [add | del | replace | change | show] : this is the operation on qdisc. For
example, to add delay on a specific interface, the operation will be add . To change
or remove delay on the specific interface, the operation will be change or del .
• dev_id : this parameter indicates the interface to be subject to emulation.
• opts :this parameter indicates the amount of delay, packet loss, duplication,
corruption, and others.

3.1 Identify interface of host h1 and host h2

In this section, we must identify the interfaces on the connected hosts.

Step 1. On host h1, type the command ifconfig to display information related to its
network interfaces and their assigned IP addresses.

Figure 8. Output of ifconfig command on host h1.

The output of the ifconfig command indicates that host h1 has two interfaces: h1-eth0
and lo. The interface h1-eth0 at host h2 is configured with IP address 10.0.0.1 and subnet
mask 255.0.0.0. This interface must be used in tc when emulating the WAN.

Step 2. In host h2, type the command ifconfig as well.

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Figure 9. Output of ifconfig command on host h2.

The output of the ifconfig command indicates that host h2 has two interfaces: h2-eth0
and lo. The interface h2-eth0 at host h1 is configured with IP address 10.0.0.2 and subnet
mask 255.0.0.0. This interface must be used in tc when emulating the WAN.

3.2 Add packet loss to the interface connecting to the WAN

In a network, packets may be lost during transmission due to factors such as bit errors
and network congestion. The rate of packets that are lost is often measured as a
percentage of lost packets with respect to the number of sent packets. In this section, you
will use netem command to insert packet loss on a network interface.

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc add dev h1-eth0 root netem loss 10%

Figure 10. Adding 10% packet loss to host h1’s interface h1-eth0.

The above command adds a 10% packet loss to host h1’s interface h1-eth0.

Step 2. The user can verify now that the connection from host h1 to host h2 has packet
losses by using the ping command from host h1’s terminal. The -c option specifies the
total number of packets to send.

ping 10.0.0.2 -c 200

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Figure 11. ping command after introducing packet loss.

In the figure 11, host h1 sends 200 ping packets to host h2. Note the icmp_seq values
demonstrated in the figure above.

You can see that icmp_seq=2, 6, 10 and 17 are missing due to packet losses. Resulting
packet loss will likely vary in each emulation.

Figure 12 shows the summary report of the previous command. By default, ping reports
the percentage of packet loss after finishing the transmission. In our test, ping reported a
packet loss rate of 10%. The measured packet loss rate will tend to become closer to the
configured loss rate as more trials are performed.

Figure 12. ping summary report showing 10% packet loss.

Note that the above scenario emulates 10% packet loss on the unidirectional link from
host h1 to host h2. If we want to emulate packet loss on both directions, a packet loss of
10% must also be added to host h2.

Step 3. In host h2’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc add dev h2-eth0 root netem loss 10%

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Figure 13. Adding 10% packet loss to host h2’s interface h2-eth0.

Step 4. The user can verify now that the connection between host h1 and host h2 has
more packets losses (10% from host h1 + 10% from host h2) by retyping the ping
command on host h1’s terminal:

ping 10.0.0.2 -c 200

Figure 14. ping command after introducing packet loss.

In the figure 14, host h1 sends 200 ping packets to host h2. Note the icmp_seq values
demonstrated in the figure above.

You can see that icmp_seq=3, 6, 10, 14, 23 and 27 are missing due to packet losses.
Resulting packet loss will likely vary in each emulation.

Figure 14 shows the summary report of the previous command. By default, ping reports
the percentage of packet loss after finishing the transmission. In our test, ping reported a
packet loss rate of 10%. The measured packet loss rate will tend to become closer to the
configured loss rate as more trials are performed.

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Figure 15. ping summary report showing 20.5% packet loss.

The result above indicates that 159 out of 200 packets were received successfully (20.5%
packet loss).

3.3 Restore default values

To remove the packet loss added in Section 3.2 and restore the default configuration, you
must delete the rules of the interfaces on host h1 and host h2.

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h1-eth0 root netem

Figure 16. Deleting all rules on interface h1-eth0.

Step 2. Apply the same steps to remove rules on host h2. In host h2’s terminal, type the
following command:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h2-eth0 root netem

Figure 17. Deleting all rules on interface h2-eth0.

As a result, the tc queueing discipline will restore its default values of the device h2-eth0.

Step 3. Now, the user can verify that the connection from host h1 to host h2 has no
explicit packet loss configured by using the ping command from host h1’s terminal, press
Ctrl+c to stop the test:

ping 10.0.0.2

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Figure 18. Verifying latency after deleting all rules on both devices.

The result above indicates that all five packets were received successfully (0% packet loss)
and that the minimum, average, maximum, and standard deviation of the Round-Trip
Time (RTT) were 0.043, 0.112, 0.357, and 0.122 milliseconds respectively.

3.4 Add correlation value for packet loss to interface connecting to WAN

An optional correlation may be added. Adding correlation causes the random number
generator to be less random and can be used to emulate packet burst losses 1.

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc add dev h1-eth0 root netem loss 50% 50%

Figure 19. Verifying latency after deleting all rules on both devices.

The above command introduces a packet loss rate of 50%, and each successive probability
depends 50% on the last one1. Note that a packet loss rate this high is unlikely.

Step 2. The user can verify now that the connection from host h1 to host h2 has packet
losses by using the ping command from host h1’s terminal.

ping 10.0.0.2 -c 50

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Figure 20. ping in progress showing successive packet loss.

The result above shows an example where successive packets were dropped: [3, 4, 6, 10,],
[13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21], etc.

Step 3. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command to delete previous
configurations:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h1-eth0 root netem

Figure 21. Deleting all rules on interface h1-eth0.

4 Adding packet corruption

Besides packet loss, packet corruption can be introduced with NETEM.

4.1 Add packet corruption to an interface connected to the WAN

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc add dev h1-eth0 root netem corrupt 0.01%

The new value added here represents packet corruption percentage (0.01%).

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Figure 22. Adding packets corruption (0.01%) to interface h1-eth0.

Step 2. The user can now verify the previous configuration by using the iperf3 tool to
check the retransmissions. To launch iPerf3 in server mode, run the command iperf3 -
s in host h2’s terminal.

iperf3 -s

Figure 23. Host h2 running iPerf3 as server.

Step 3. To launch iPerf3 in client mode, run the command iperf3 -c 10.0.0.2 in host
h1’s terminal.

iperf3 -c 10.0.0.2

Figure 24. Retransmissions after packets corruption.

The figure above shows the retransmission values on each time interval (1 second). The
total number of retransmitted packets, due to packet corruption, is 3710. This verifies
that packet corruption was indeed, applied to the interface on host h1.

Step 4. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command to delete previous
configurations:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h1-eth0 root netem

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Figure 25. Deleting all rules on interface h1-eth0.

Step 5. In order to stop the server, press Ctrl+c in host h2’s terminal. The user can see
the throughput results in the server side too. The summarized data on the server is similar
to that of the client side’s and must be interpreted in the same way.

5 Add packet reordering

Packets are sometimes not delivered in the same order they were sent. In order to
emulate reordering in NETEM, the reorder option is used. Proceed with the steps below.

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc add dev h1-eth0 root netem delay 10ms reorder 25% 50%

Figure 26. Adding packet reordering.

In this command, 25% of the packets (with a correlation value of 50%) will be sent
immediately, while the remainder 75% will be delayed by 10ms.

Step 2. The user can verify the effect of packet reorder by using the ping command on
host h1’s terminal, press Ctrl+c to stop the test:

ping 10.0.0.2

Figure 27. ping test illustrating the effect of packet reordering.

Consider the first four packets of the figure above. The first and second packets did not
experience delay (one out of four, or 25%), while the next three packets experienced a
delay of ~10 milliseconds (three out of four, or 75%). The measured reordering rate will
tend to become closer to the configured reordering rate as more trials are performed.

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It is possible that your first packet will experience delay, but this effect will eventually
occur in future tests.

Step 3. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command to delete previous
configurations:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h1-eth0 root netem

Figure 28. Deleting all rules on interface h1-eth0.

6 Add packet duplication

Duplicate packets may be present in networks as a result of retransmissions. NETEM

provides the option duplicate to inject duplicate packets. Before introducing packet
corruption, make sure to restore the default configuration of the interfaces on host h1
and host h2 by applying the commands of Section 3.3. Then, proceeds with the following
steps.

Step 1. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command:

sudo tc qdisc change dev h1-eth0 root netem duplicate 50%

Figure 29. Adding packet duplication.

The above command will produce a duplication of 50% (i.e., 50% of the packets will be
received twice at the destination).

Step 2. The user can verify the effect of packet duplication by using the ping command
on host h1’s terminal, press Ctrl+c to stop the test:

ping 10.0.0.2

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Figure 30. ping test illustrating the effect of packet duplication.

The result above indicates that five duplicate packets were received. Duplicate packets
are also marked with (DUP!). The measured rate of duplicate packets will tend to become
closer to the configured rate as more trials are performed.

Step 3. In host h1’s terminal, type the following command to delete previous
configurations:

sudo tc qdisc del dev h1-eth0 root netem

Figure 31. Deleting all rules on interface h1-eth0.

This concludes Lab 4. Stop the emulation and then exit out of MiniEdit.

References

1. Linux foundation. [Online]. Available:

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/netem.
2. S. Hemminger, “Network emulation with NETEM,” Linux conf au. 2005, pp. 18-
23. 2005.
3. How to use the linux traffic control panagiotis vouzis [Online]. Available:
https://netbeez.net/blog/how-to-use-the-linux-traffic-control.
4. M. Brown, F. Bolelli, N. Patriciello, “Traffic control howto,” Guide to IP Layer
Network, 2006.

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