Abstract. Traditionally, testbeds for networking and systems research have been stand-alone facilities: each is owned and operated by a single administrative entity, and is intended to be used independently of other testbeds. However, this isolated facility model is at odds with researchers' ever-increasing needs for experiments at larger scale and with a broader diversity of network technologies. The research community will be much better served by a federated model. In this model, each federated testbed maintains its own autonomy and unique strengths, but all federates work together to make their resources available under a common framework. Our challenge, then, is to design a federated testbed framework that balances competing needs: We must establish trust, but at the same time maintain the autonomy of each federated facility. While providing a unified interface to a broad set of resources, we need to expose the diversity that makes them valuable. Finally, our federation should work smoothly in a coordinated fashion, but avoid central points of failure and inter-facility dependencies. We argue that treating testbed design as a federated distributed systems problem is an effective approach to achieving this balance. The technique is illustrated through the example of ProtoGENI, a system we have designed, built, and operated according to the federated model.
GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations, is a National Science Foundation project to create a "virtual laboratory at the frontiers of network science and engineering for exploring future internets at scale." It provides researchers, educators, and students with resources that they can use to build their own networks that span the country and---through federation---the world. GENI enables experimenters to try out bold new network architectures and designs for networked systems, and to deploy and evaluate these systems on a diverse set of resources over a large footprint.
This tutorial is a starting point for running experiments on GENI. It provides an overview of GENI and covers the process of creating a network and running a simple experiment using two tools: the Flack GUI and the INSTOOLS instrumentation service.
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