Comunication between Android Emulators

Question

Hi to all, I wanted to know if it is possible the comunication between two Android Emulators started on two different machines networked.

For example - Emulator A run on machine M1 - Emulator B run on machine M2

Can A and B exchange messages?

If yes, what ip address do I use?

Thank you very much Deborah

Answer 1

You might know this already. As of android-sdk-tools_r7 it should at least be possible to connect two emulators to each other. Whether is works between physical machines is not something I know. It might be possible to set up masquerading between the two hosts for this specific broadcast.

From the android commit

Enable interconnection of emulators

This patch adds a -shared-net-id option to the emulator which joins the emulator in a shared network. If the option is given the emulator is started with an additional network interface bound to a multicast socket. This multicast socket emulates a network hub, interconnecting emulators. If the -shared-net-id option is not given, nothing changes.

To connect two emulators, use the -shared-net-id <number> command line option when starting the emulator. They will then directly share everything sent to or read from ip 10.1.2.<number> on the emulator.

Another approach would be to enable port forwarding between the emulators using adb, and then set up masquerading for those ports on the networked machines.

I'm not really sure that either of these solutions match the use case that you're asking after. If not, adding more details to the original question might help. :)

Disclaimer: I have not tried the first approach, and the second I've only used to make sure that an emulator could bypass a nasty corporate firewall and HTTP proxy so that we could test the android browser. The principle should be sound though.

Update: Nope, I played around with it a whole lot and found no nice solutions. I am not good enough at iptables to set up a valid tunnel that way that works for the server end.

Regards,
Mikael

Answer 2

Hi Mikael, thanks for your reply! The problem is the following.

Given two computers:

-PC1 (address:160.98.55.202)

-PC2 (address:160.98.55.203)

start, respectively:

-avd_1 on PC1 as ServerSocket (SERVER)

-avd_2 on PC2 as Socket (CLIENT)

The Client application on avd_2 have to send data to Server application on avd_1.

I used the second approach to allow comunication on the same computers, but this approach does not allow communication between two emulators on different machine!

Thanks for the first approach suggested!

If you have any other suggestions I would be grateful!

Regards,

Deborah

Answer 3

An emulator normally has outbound access to the development machine's LAN or internet connection, so the problem is on the inbound side.

You can use an emulator or ADB port forward to send traffic into the emulator, but possibly only locally originating traffic on the development machine's loopback interface, and not external traffic. If that is indeed the case, the simplest thing would probably be to write or configure a port forwarder that listens on the development machine's external interface and forwards to the port that is forwarded into the emulator.