As testing and benchmarking performance of web
services and networked applications has proven to be cost-effective, and crucial in some applications, increased
significance has been attached to the development of hardware
and software network emulators and simulators. In this paper,
we discuss a possible design of a light-weight real-time IP
network emulator that can provide the same functionality and
performance as hardware simulators. Also, as the systematic
software engineering discipline has become a necessity in the
software development life-cycle, we present a possible
approach, utilizing mature software engineering disciplines, for
building the software architecture of the emulator. We then use
ADLARS [1], an Architecture Description Language for Real-time Systems to describe the architecture. The emulator’s
architecture serves as a good test-bed for our ADL because of
its real-time and concurrent nature. We conclude by testing our
design and presenting a possible JAVA implementation of the
emulator over a UNIX system
