In VINI veritas: realistic and controlled network experimentation

ABSTRACT

This paper describes VINI, a virtual network infrastructure that allows network researchers to evaluate their protocols and services in a realistic environment that also provides a high degree of control over network conditions. VINI allows researchers to deploy and evaluate their ideas with real routing software, traffic loads, and network events. To provide researchers flexibility in designing their experiments, VINI supports simultaneous experiments with arbitrary network topologies on a shared physical infrastructure. This paper tackles the following important design question: What set of concepts and techniques facilitate flexible, realistic, and controlled experimentation (e.g., multiple topologies and the ability to tweak routing algorithms) on a fixed physical infrastructure? We first present VINI's high-level design and the challenges of virtualizing a single network. We then present PL-VINI, an implementation of VINI on PlanetLab, running the "Internet In a Slice". Our evaluation of PL-VINI shows that it provides a realistic and controlled environment for evaluating new protocols and services.

REFERENCES

• 1: David Andersen , Hari Balakrishnan , Frans Kaashoek , Robert Morris, Resilient overlay networks, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 21-24, 2001, Banff, Alberta, Canada
• 2: Nick Feamster , David G. Andersen , Hari Balakrishnan , M. Frans Kaashoek, Measuring the effects of internet path faults on reactive routing, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, June 11-14, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA
• 3: L. Peterson, T. Anderson, D. Culler, and T. Roscoe, "A blueprint for introducing disruptive technology into the Internet," in Proc. SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networking, October 2002.
• 4: A. Bavier, M. Bowman, D. Culler, B. Chun, S. Karlin, S. Muir, L. Peterson, T. Roscoe, T. Spalink, and M. Wawrzoniak, "Operating System Support for Planetary-Scale Network Services," in Proc. Networked Systems Design and Implementation, March 2004.
• 5: J. Touch and S. Hotz, "The X-Bone," in Proc. Global Internet Mini-Conference, pp. 75--83, November 1998.
• 6: X. Jiang and D. Xu, "Violin: Virtual internetworking on overlay infrastructure," in Proc. International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications, pp. 937--946, 2004.
• 7: The GENI Initiative. http://www.nsf.gov/cise/geni/.
• 8: GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations. http://www.geni.net/.
• 9: M. Handley, E. Kohler, A. Ghosh, O. Hodson, and P. Radoslavov, "Designing extensible IP router software," in Proc. Networked Systems Design and Implementation, May 2005.
• 10: Eddie Kohler , Robert Morris , Benjie Chen , John Jannotti , M. Frans Kaashoek, The click modular router, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.18 n.3, p.263-297, Aug. 2000 [doi>10.1145/354871.354874]
• 11: "OpenVPN: An open source SSL VPN solution." http://openvpn.net/.
• 12: N. Feamster and H. Balakrishnan, "Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis," in Proc. Networked Systems Design and Implementation, pp. 49--56, May 2005.
• 13: "ns-2 Network Simulator." http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/.
• 14: "SSFNet." http://www.ssfnet.org/.
• 15: Brian White , Jay Lepreau , Leigh Stoller , Robert Ricci , Shashi Guruprasad , Mac Newbold , Mike Hibler , Chad Barb , Abhijeet Joglekar, An integrated experimental environment for distributed systems and networks, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060313]
• 16: "DETER: A laboratory for security research." http://www.isi.edu/deter/.
• 17: Amin Vahdat , Ken Yocum , Kevin Walsh , Priya Mahadevan , Dejan Kostić , Jeff Chase , David Becker, Scalability and accuracy in a large-scale network emulator, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060315]
• 18: "WAIL: Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory." http://wail.cs.wisc.edu/.
• 19: "Open Network Laboratory (ONL)." http://onl.arl.wustl.edu/.
• 20: M. Hibler, R. Ricci, L. Stoller, J. Duerig, S. Guruprasad, T. Stack, K. Webb, and J. Lepreau, "Feedback-directed Virtualization Techniques for Scalable Network Experimentation," Tech. Rep. FTN-2004-02, University of Utah, May 2002. http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/virt-ftn2004-02.pdf.
• 21: Linux VServers Project. http://linux-vserver.org/.
• 22: D. Lowenthal, "PlanetLab Sirius Calendar Service." https://snowball.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/pslogin.php.
• 23: Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control. http://lartc.org/.
• 24: M. Huang, "VNET: PlanetLab Virtualized Network Access," Tech. Rep. PDN-05-029, PlanetLab Consortium, June 2005.
• 25: L. Peterson, A. Bavier, M. E. Fiuczynski, and S. Muir, "Experiences Building PlanetLab," Tech. Rep. TR-755-06, Princeton University, June 2006.
• 26: "User-Mode Linux." http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/.
• 27: Andy Bavier , Mark Huang , Larry Peterson, An Overlay Data Plane for PlanetLab, Proceedings of the Advanced Industrial Conference on Telecommunications/Service Assurance with Partial and Intermittent Resources Conference/E-Learning on Telecommunications Workshop (AICT/SAPIR/ELETE'05), p.8-14, July 17-22, 2005 [doi>10.1109/AICT.2005.24]
• 28: "Iperf 1.7.0: The TCP/UDP bandwidth measurement tool." http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.6 Internetworking

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
architecture, experimentation, internet, routing, virtualization