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I need a product to simulate network latency for testing mobile applications (in particular iphone and android). I plan to set up a wifi router connected to a linux box, and write a number of scripts to approximate different types of connectivity issues.

So far, I've taken a cursory look at Netem and ns-2 (or its offspring ns-3). Netem looks very easy to deploy and configure, but they both look like they'll require some in-depth investigation.

Does anyone have positive/negative experiences with either of those solutions that they could share? Or maybe used a different solution for this problem?

DougW
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  • I've heard of DeviceAnywhere but don't have firsthand experience. – seand Sep 22 '10 at 02:27
  • I'm in the process of setting up an Ubuntu box with a network connection bridged through Netem to WIFI. I'll update this question with my experiences. – DougW Sep 29 '10 at 23:53

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If anyone comes here looking for tips, I've found a solution that seems to work well.

Ubuntu comes with Netem installed, so I went ahead and just made use of that. Basically, I got a computer with two ethernet ports, forwarded one to the other and applied Netem latency settings to the connection. Then I attached a wireless router to one, and LAN to the other. Netem lets me play with all kinds of latency and packet loss settings.

Btw, I also tried to use a few different laptops and set the internal wireless card up as an ad-hoc wireless router. I got it working for the most part, but finding a laptop with an internal wireless card that plays nice with ad-hoc in Linux is tricky at best... can't recommend it.

DougW
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  • You can try installing a linux distribution such as Open-WRT on your Wireless Router and run Netem on it. I haven't tried it but heard that it works well – sharjeel Nov 06 '10 at 10:36
  • That's true, we could really cut the computer out altogether. In my case, I preferred a full blown linux distro since there were other things I wanted to play around with, but yeah that's a good idea. – DougW Nov 07 '10 at 00:40