# Menes: Towards a Generic, Fully-Automated Test and Validation Platform for Wireless Networks

**Authors:** Kerim Gökarslan  
**arXiv:** [2006.02270](https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02270)  
**Date:** 2020-06-03  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/arxiv-id/2006.02270v1/

## Key points

- Importance of testing and validating wireless systems under various circumstances
- Limitations of existing network simulation solutions that require analytical modeling
- Benefits of network emulation in employing real network applications on virtualized devices
- Challenges with current network emulation solutions, including lack of full-scale automation and reliance on experienced users for configuration scripts
- Menes as a novel wireless network emulation platform that provides a unified high-level configuration interface and fully-automated platform
- Integration of state-of-the-art emulation, virtualization, and network applications in Menes
- Implementation of Menes based on EMANE with Docker
- Advantages of Menes, including requiring fewer computing resources, decreasing CAPEX and OPEX, and being highly extensible for different use cases.

## Summary

The paper titled "Menes: Towards a Generic, Fully-Automated Test and Validation Platform for Wireless Networks" discusses the importance of testing and validating wireless systems under various circumstances. With the increasing complexity of wireless networks, it becomes impractical to perform testing on real deployments. To address this issue, network administrators rely on network simulators or emulators to validate their configurations and designs. However, existing network simulation solutions have limitations as they require users to model the network behavior analytically. On the other hand, network emulation allows users to employ real network applications on virtualized network devices. Despite their complex design, current network emulation solutions lack full-scale automation and depend on experienced users to write complex configuration scripts for testing. This reliance on human operators introduces the possibility of errors in the validation process. Furthermore, these solutions require significant computational resources that may not be feasible for many users. Additionally, most existing network emulators focus primarily on lower layers of the network, requiring users to use their own network applications to control and measure performance. To overcome these challenges, the authors propose a novel wireless network emulation platform called Menes. Menes provides users with a unified high-level configuration interface for different layers of wireless networks, reducing management complexities associated with existing emulators while offering a generic fully-automated platform. Menes is designed as a generic, full-stack test and validation platform that integrates state-of-the-art emulation, virtualization, and network applications including performance measurement tools. The authors also provide an implementation of Menes based on EMANE with Docker. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that this system requires fewer computing resources compared to existing solutions while significantly decreasing capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX). Furthermore, Menes proves highly extensible for different use cases. In conclusion, this paper presents Menes as an innovative solution for testing and validating wireless networks. By providing a unified configuration interface and fully-automated platform which reduces management complexities associated with existing emulators while offering improved efficiency and scalability; Menes addresses the limitations of existing network emulators while significantly decreasing CAPEX and OPEX requirements as well as requiring fewer computing resources compared to other solutions available in the market today .