# Deploying Secure Distributed Systems: Comparative Analysis of GNS3 and SEED Internet Emulator
## 6 Results and Evaluation
### Latency and Jitter
#### 6.2.3 Hybrid System  
Table 6 presents the results based on the external communication of the GNS3 platform and physical Cisco equipment in our distributed model, where \"c\" represents physical equipment in the topology.  
The study [59] compared OSPF routers and OpenFlow switches for providing the least delay in communication for the Distributed System and found that the OSPF protocol had increased delay times due to the protocol having to calculate the shortest path route in the model. However, our results demonstrated that the average latency delay was around or below 20 ms for all our node communication combinations, which is acceptable. In a study by [60], a Distributed System was presented combining GNS3 and the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), where the latency was observed to be very good, demonstrating the scalability and flexibility to incorporate GNS3 into various other distributed models  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Nodes** & **Min Hops** & **Max** & **Min** & **Avg** & **StdDev** & **Median** & **Jitter** \\ \hline R1-R2 & 1 & 0.304 & 0.054 & 0.110 & 0.025 & 0.107 & 0.016 \\ R1-R3 & 2 & 0.579 & 0.052 & 0.108 & 0.030 & 0.104 & 0.018 \\ R3-R2 & 1 & 0.393 & 0.053 & 0.109 & 0.029 & 0.104 & 0.019 \\ R3-R6 & 2 & 0.420 & 0.054 & 0.109 & 0.031 & 0.105 & 0.020 \\ R1-R6 & 1 & 1.040 & 0.054 & 0.112 & 0.042 & 0.105 & 0.020 \\ R2-R5 & 2 & 0.332 & 0.052 & 0.109 & 0.027 & 0.105 & 0.018 \\ R4-R5 & 1 & 1.250 & 0.054 & 0.118 & 0.053 & 0.105 & 0.026 \\ R4-R6 & 2 & 1.980 & 0.074 & 0.148 & 0.071 & 0.136 & 0.031 \\ R6-R1 & 1 & 0.255 & 0.055 & 0.111 & 0.027 & 0.107 & 0.019 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 5: SEED Internet Emulator Latency and Jitter (ms).  
while still achieving meaningful results. The future concept of a distributed architecture was conveyed, where the core layer will use physical devices and the edge layer will comprise SD-LANs [61]. Despite the possible opportunity of eventually migrating all networks into network emulation technology, one of the significant issues around this is the significant cost of the infrastructure needed to host the system. The distributed network technology aims to overcome this limitation, as demonstrated in Appendix A. Hybrid systems do provide a reasonable solution for cost-effective integration to solve particular use cases [62].  
While configuring hybrid systems, we noted that emulated networks require a significant amount of time for the initial setup due to additional software configuration, including setting up the network emulation platforms. To expand on this work, we could build a larger-scale hybrid network consisting of both physical and emulated components to observe the results on a larger scale. Additionally, we can explore a more-comprehensive performance comparison of GNS3 and the SEED Internet Emulator, considering different performance criteria such as scalability, flexibility, and security. Future research can also focus on programmable automatic emulation technologies and incorporating security-by-design architectures to explore the opportunities provided by these technologies [63]. One approach to implementing the security architecture into network emulation during the development phase is to use vulnerability assessment tools that can be run simultaneously and automatically in the program configuration, providing enhanced operational security management before the architecture is released and deployed within an organization [64].