Virtualbricks for DTN satellite communications research and education

Virtualbricks is a virtualization solution for GNU/Linux platforms developed by the authors and included in Debian. The paper aims to show its potential, referring to version 1.0, just released, when applied to both research and education on DTN satellite communications. In brief, Virtualbricks is a frontend for the management of Qemu/KVM Virtual Machines (VMs) and VDE virtualized network devices (switches, channel emulators, etc.). It can be used to manage either isolated VMs, or testbeds consisting of many VMs interconnected by VDE elements. Among the wide variety of possible applications, with or without VM interconnections, the focus here is on the development of a virtual testbed on DTN satellite communications, a task for which Virtualbricks was especially designed. After having introduced the main characteristics of Virtualbricks, in the paper we will show how to set-up a Virtualbricks testbed, taking as an example a testbed recently used by the authors to investigate Moon communications through orbiters. The validity of Virtualbricks results is confirmed by comparison with results achieved on a real testbed, set-up for this purpose. The same testbed has also been successfully used for educational purposes at the University of Bologna.