DEMO: SmartNet: Bridging Performance and Realism in Network Emulation with SmartNICs

Network emulators are essential for testing and validating new networking solutions before deployment. In this work, we present SmartNet, a new hardware-based emulation framework that brings SmartNIC awareness to network experimentation. SmartNet enables realistic and scalable evaluation of offloading, host interaction, and in-network processing. Using a simple API interface, researchers can define and deploy topologies with multiple switches, hosts, and diverse link characteristics (e.g., bandwidth, latency, loss) to evaluate SmartNIC-driven architectures.