In the module "Software Engineering Project" (SE Project) of the computer science degree programme, students gain their first experience with a software development project. In the module, the focus is not on the product that is developed, but on project management and how to work in a team. Nevertheless, 4 students wanted to develop something that was close to the network and could be used in the future. Since we knew that we would have to do a live cycle of our WAN emulator appliance in the network lab in the near future, a new project was started with the students. The goal was to develop an alternative based on open source components to the expensive hardware appliances.

After the project was completed, the project "WEmulate" was further developed at the Institute for Networks and Security and has been in use in the classroom for a year. WEmulate can be installed on hardware or used as a virtual appliance.

In a telecommunication network like the Internet, there are constant disturbances and deviations, sometimes only minimal. One of the things the telecommunication protocols try to do is to make sure that the applications running over the network don't notice. Each application reacts differently to the network events.

WEmulate makes it possible to create the real conditions of a network in a laboratory environment and thus to test an application in the laboratory as if it were being used over the Internet. With version 2.0, the project is now better anchored in the open source community and the product is already being used worldwide.