Many of today's military services and applications run on geographically distributed sites. Before these services and applications can be deployed in an actual network, they need to be tested and evaluated under realistic scenarios with many unpredictable factors. Existing experimental tools cannot meet the requirements for scale, accuracy and timeliness. A network emulation framework called ROSENET is proposed that can meet these requirements by using a remote parallel simulation server to

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... l a wide area network and a local network emulator to provide timely QoS predictions for testing real world applications. This paper discusses the challenges faced in applying ROSENET to defense applications through two case studies. In the first case study we apply synthetic traffic workloads over DARPA's NMS network topology for a large scale simulation and define a metric called remote emulation delay to evaluate and quantify ROSENET's performance. In the second case study we illustrate the procedures using ROSENET to evaluate a contemporary real-time distributed VoIP application, Skype, and present experimental results.