Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Three experimental environments traditionally support network and distributed systems research: network emulators, network simulators, and live networks. The continued use of multiple approaches highlights both the value and inadequacy of each. Netbed, a descendant of Emulab, provides an experimentation facility that integrates these approaches, allowing researchers to configure and access networks composed of emulated, simulated, and wide-area nodes and links. Netbed's primary goals are ease of use, control, and realism, achieved through consistent use of virtualization and abstraction.By providing operating system-like services, such as resource allocation and scheduling, and by virtualizing heterogeneous resources, Netbed acts as a virtual machine for network experimentation. This paper presents Netbed's overall design and implementation and demonstrates its ability to improve experimental automation and efficiency. These, in turn, lead to new methods of experimentation, including automated parameter-space studies within emulation and straightforward comparisons of simulated, emulated, and wide-area scenarios.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jong Suk Ahn , Peter B. Danzig , Zhen Liu , Limin Yan, Evaluation of TCP Vegas: emulation and experiment, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.185-195, August 28-September 01, 1995, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/217382.217431]
• 2: M. Allman, A. Caldwell, and S. Ostermann. ONE: The Ohio Network Emulator. Technical Report TR--19972, Ohio University Computer Science, Aug. 1997.
• 3: Y. Amir, C. Danilov, M. Miskin-Amir, J. Stanton, and C. Tutu. Practical Wide-Area Database Replication. Technical report, Johns Hopkins University, 2002.
• 4: 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 [doi>10.1145/502034.502048]
• 5: T. Anderson. A Case for Access: A High Performance Communication and Computation Environment for Wide Area Distributed Systems, Networking, and Applications Research. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/access/.
• 6: Lawrence S. Brakmo , Larry L. Peterson, Experiences with network simulation, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.80-90, May 23-26, 1996, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/233013.233027]
• 7: CAIRN: Collaborative Advanced Internet Research Network. http://www.isi.edu/CAIRN/.
• 8: S. Dawson , F. Jahanian , T. Mitton , Teck-Lee Tung, Testing of fault-tolerant and real-time distributed systems via protocol fault injection, Proceedings of the The Twenty-Sixth Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS '96), p.404, June 25-27, 1996
• 9: Dawson Engler , David Yu Chen , Seth Hallem , Andy Chou , Benjamin Chelf, Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 21-24, 2001, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/502034.502041]
• 10: Network Emulation in the Vint/NS Simulator, Proceedings of the The Fourth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications, p.244, July 06-08, 1999
• 11: Sally Floyd , Vern Paxson, Difficulties in simulating the internet, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.9 n.4, p.392-403, August 2001 [doi>10.1109/90.944338]
• 12: Bryan Ford , Godmar Back , Greg Benson , Jay Lepreau , Albert Lin , Olin Shivers, The Flux OSKit: a substrate for kernel and language research, Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.38-51, October 05-08, 1997, Saint Malo, France [doi>10.1145/268998.266642]
• 13: Michael R. Garey , David S. Johnson, Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness, W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, NY, 1979
• 14: Symantec Ghost. http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/.
• 15: J. Heidemann et al. Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation, http://www.isi.edu/johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00d.html.
• 16: L. Ingber. Very Fast Simulated Re-Annealing. Journal of Mathematical Computer Modelling, 12:967--973, 1989. http://www.ingber.com/asa89_vfsr.ps.gz.
• 17: IXP1200. http://www.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/ixp 1200.htm.
• 18: P.-H. Kamp and R. N. M. Watson. Jails: Confining the omnipotent root. In Proc. 2nd Intl. SANE Conference, May 2000.
• 19: A. M. Lapone, N. F. Maxemchuk, and H. Schulzrinne. The Bell Laboratories Network Emulator. Technical Report BL0113820930913-64TM, AT&T Bell Labs, Sept. 1993.
• 20: David Mazières , Michael Kaminsky , M. Frans Kaashoek , Emmett Witchel, Separating key management from file system security, Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.124-139, December 12-15, 1999, Charleston, South Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/319151.319160]
• 21: P. E. McKenney, D. Y. Lee, and B. A. Denny. Traffic Generator Software Release Notes. SRI International and USC/ISI Postel Center for Experimental Networking. http://www.postel.org/tg/.
• 22: J. Moore and J. Chase. Cluster On Demand. Technical Report CS-2002-07, Duke University, Dept. of Computer Science, May 2002.
• 23: Athicha Muthitacharoen , Benjie Chen , David Mazières, A low-bandwidth network file system, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 21-24, 2001, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/502034.502052]
• 24: The Network Simulator ns-2: Validation Tests. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-tests.html.
• 25: Michael Neufeld , Ashish Jain , Dirk Grunwald, Nsclick:: bridging network simulation and deployment, Proceedings of the 5th ACM international workshop on Modeling analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, September 28-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570758.570772]
• 26: NIST Internetworking Technology Group. NIST Net home page. http://www.antd.nist.gov/itg/nistnet/.
• 27: Brian D. Noble , M. Satyanarayanan , Giao T. Nguyen , Randy H. Katz, Trace-based mobile network emulation, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.51-61, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France [doi>10.1145/263105.263140]
• 28: Océano Project. http://www.research.ibm.com/oceanoproject/.
• 29: Ron Oldfield , David Kotz, Armada: A Parallel File System for Computational Grids, Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, p.194, May 15-18, 2001
• 30: R. Oldfield and D. Kotz. Using the Emulab network testbed to evaluate the Armada I/O framework for computational grids. Technical report, Dartmouth, May 2002. ftp://ftp.cs.dartmouth.edu/pub/raoldfi/armada/oldfield:armada-emulab-tr.pdf.
• 31: Vivek S. Pai , Peter Druschel , Willy Zwaenepoel, IO-lite: a unified I/O buffering and caching system, Proceedings of the third symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, p.15-28, February 1999, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 32: Partition Image. http://www.partimage.org/.
• 33: L. Peterson, T. Anderson, D. Culler, and T. Roscoe. A Blueprint for Introducing Disruptive Technology into the Internet. In Proc. HotNets-I, Princeton, N J, Oct. 2002.
• 34: PXE Preboot Execution Environment Specification Version 2.1. ftp://download.intel.com/ial/wfm/pxespec.pdf.
• 35: Rembo Technology. BpBatch. http://www.bpbatch.org/.
• 36: L. Rizzo. Dummynet and Forward Error Correction. In Proc. of the 1998 USENIX Annual Technical Conf., June 1998.
• 37: rsync. http://rsync.samba.org/.
• 38: B. Segall, D. Arnold, J. Boot, M. Henderson, and T. Phelps. Content Based Routing with Elvin4. In Proc. AUUG '00, June 2000.
• 39: Reiko Tanese, Distributed Genetic Algorithms, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, p.434-439, June 01, 1989
• 40: The VINT Project. The ns Manual, Apr. 2002. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-documentation.html.
• 41: Unison. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/bcpierce/unison/.
• 42: 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]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.4 Communications Management
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems
      D.4.8 Performance

General Terms:
Design, Management, Performance