TEMPEST: a new Test EnvironMent for Performance Evaluation of the Scheduling of packeTs

The packet scheduling problem has been deeply studied for lot of years by researchers in the computer science and telecommunications fields as an important solution that decides the order in which packets are sent over a link in order to provide QoS on a network. Recently, the packet scheduling has become again a challenging topic due to the massive use of wireless technologies (e.g. WiFi, LTE, 4G/5G) with which to provide high QoS guarantees is still an open problem. Unfortunately, it is difficult to compare different solutions and actually test them in order to select the most proper packet scheduler for each particular environment. In this paper we present TEMPEST, a new Test EnvironMent for Performance Evaluation of the Scheduling of packeTs, which is a novel tool able to help the research in the packet scheduling field. TEMPEST is able to measure the actual performance of a packet scheduler in several environments, both wired or wireless, like the execution time, QoS metrics and throughput, giving prompt feedback about the quality of the solution studied. The goal of this paper is to present in detail the current features of TEMPEST, showing how it is easy to add, configure, test and evaluate several scheduling solutions in multiple scenarios.