NRT: Collaborative Research: A Unified Experimental Environment for Diverse Network Technologies

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

A critical issue for t e development of future network and distributed system technologies is the availabil- ity of testbed infrastructure for conducting research.Availability as three components.First,it requires that testbeds provide a set of diverse and modern networking resources in realistic scenarios:environments that include PCs,(potentially mobile)wireless and sensor nodes,commercial-quality switches and routers, and modern network interconnects.Second,availability requires software to e .ectively manage the use of these resources:this requires providing "hardware level" access to experimenters,through a uni .ed and re- motely accessible user interface,in a manner that also ensures security both inside and outside experimental environments.Third,availability requires infrastructure for experiment manipulation,monitoring,measure- ment,and validation:e.g.,the ability to inject network tra .c and faults,the ability to obtain precise data from experiments,and the assurance that the testbed is an accurate model of the real world. The work described in this proposal is to build on the University of Utah 's Netbed to address the three aspects of availability described above.The 165,000 line Netbed software system is e .ectively an operating system for experiments in distributed systems and networking.The bulk of its code is independent of the network 's actual mec anisms,so it presents a common interface to experimenters across a variety of mec anisms,including real networks,emulated networks in a cluster,and simulated networks.Netbed 's support for ybrid experimentation allows .exible combinations of real code,abstracted tra .c generation, synthetic network environments,and real networks.Emulab Netbed 's primary resource,is an extremely successful 170-node,time-and space-shared automated cluster testbed that as been in 24/7 production use for several years.Netbed is currently being used by 440 researchers,from 50 institutions,for over 80 projects. The proposed work will provide deliverables in four areas.First,the existing Emulab cluster and its interconnect will be enlarged and modernized.Emulab will grow to provide continuing service to the public, including user support.The complementary Utah and Wisconsin facilities (WAIL)will be linked,allowing resource allocation and co-scheduling across them.This will provide a seamless transition from simulation, through emulation on PC-based routers,to large-scale testing on real routers.Second,Netbed will be extended to control,as transparently to users as possible,many additional kinds of network devices and deployments.Netbed will provide four di .erent platforms of wireless,sensor,and mobile devices,ranging from a .xed array of wireless nodes (a "tabletop" environment)to an actual set of mobile devices deployed on a campus scale.The Netbed facilities will also be generalized with the addition of "hard" devices - IP routers,layer 1 switches,optical devices,Intel IXPs,and nodes deployed in the wide-area - as well as new "soft" devices suc as virtual nodes and links to enable experiments at 1 - 2 orders of magnitude greater scale.Third,the Netbed system,speci .cally the Emulab cluster,will be "hardened" so that,when deployed,it can safely quarantine malicious code while still being remotely accessible to researchers.The enhanced Emulab will be able to serve as a testbed for most network security researc and evaluation,suc as worm containment,IP traceback,intrusion detection,and counter measures for denial-of-service (DoS), and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)attacks.Support for researc in these areas will require Emulab to support osts running Microsoft Windows.Fourth,new software will provide a comprehensive system for realistic network tra .c generation,network tra .c measurements,and a measurement arc ive.A wide area network monitoring system and measurement archive will provide important data to Netbed researchers and the community at large.It will also serve as the primary source of data from whic we can validate our modeling and test e .orts. The intellectual merit of the proposed work lies in the creation of new technologies for networking and distributed system experimentation.This work will develop new techniques for integrating widely varied resources,both actual and simulated,both hardware and software,within a single and uni .ed experimental framework.This work will be realized in an expanded Emulab cluster,whic will continue to be available to researchers,and it will also be realized in Netbed 's software that can be used by other institutions that wish to run their own testbeds - separately,or in cooperation with Netbed.This ties directly to the broader impacts of the proposed work.The creation and delivery of an expanded Emulab,as well as the software capable of managing similar testbeds,will result in new testbeds and new testbed capabilities being made available to researchers worldwide.This will directly advance the development of future systems,as well as the teac ing and training of students and computing professionals.