The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University will purchase computing and network equipment. This equipment includes two 24-port rackmount switches, an 8-port router, PCs for network emulation, four web servers, one RAID server, six mobile computing devices with wireless networking components, a wireless access point, and racks, monitors, and other devices to support the rackmounted system. This equipment will be used to implement the EMPOWER (EMulate the PerfOmance of WidE aRea networks) environment that will be dedicated to support research in computer science and engineering. EMPOWER enables the emulation of arbitrary network topologies, including interconnected host machines and routers contains both WAN ports and LAN ports. Beyond emulation of network bandwidth, drop rates and patterns, delay distributions, and background traffic, EMPOWER provides an excellent environment to implement and evaluate different QoS schemes (such as differentiated services) and label swapping schemes (such as MPLS). Current research includes emulation kernel design, routing table configuration, network statistics visualization, and GUI to configure the network easily.
