All rights reserved.iii DEDICATION Antes que todo quiero dar gracias a Dios, que me dio espezanzas y fuerzas para cumplir este logro.Quiero dedicar esta Disertación a mis padres Abel y Lourdes; sin cuyo amor, esfuerzo, y dedicación, jamás esto hubiera sido posible.En la misma dimensión quiero también dedicar este logro a mi esposa Adriana. Su ayuda, constante paciencia, e incondicional amor han sido la luz que me guió y me dio esperanza estosúltimos tiempos. Mi hijo Sebastián ha sido otra motivación para seguir siempre adelante. Los amo a ambos.No sería justo no hacer agradecer a mis hermanos Ana y Alejandro, que me alegraron los días. Mi suegra Ana y don Lucho nos dieron valiosos consejos y estuvieron en los momentos más difíciles apoyándonos.Quiero tambien hacer mención especial a mi amigo de toda la vida Michi Berdeja, que siempre estuvo conmigo en los buenos y malos días y también a toda LA NAUSEA. The lack of analytical models that can accurately describe large-scale networked systems makes empirical experimentation indispensable for understanding complex behaviors. Research on network testbeds for testing network protocols and distributed services, including physical, emulated, and federated testbeds, has made steady progress. Although the success of these testbeds is undeniable, they fail to provide: 1) scalability, for handling large-scale networks with hundreds or thousands of hosts and routers organized in different scenarios, 2) flexibility, for testing new protocols or applications in diverse settings, and 3) inter-operability, for combining simulated and real network entities in experiments. This dissertation tackles these issues in three different dimensions.First, we present SVEET, a system that enables inter-operability between real and simulated hosts. In order to increase the scalability of networks under study, SVEET enables time-dilated synchronization between real hosts and the discrete-event simulator.Realistic TCP congestion control algorithms are implemented in the simulator to allow seamless interactions between real and simulated hosts. SVEET is validated via extensive experiments and its capabilities are assessed through case studies involving real applications.Second, we present PrimoGENI, a system that allows a distributed discrete-event simulator, running in real-time, to interact with real network entities in a federated en- Finally, to further increase the scalability of network testbeds to handle large-scale high-capacity networks, we present a novel symbiotic simulation approach. We present SymbioSim, a testbed for large-scale network experimentation where a high-performance simulation system closely cooperates with an emulation system in a mutually beneficial way. On the one hand, the simulation system benefits from incorporating the traffic metadata from real applications in the emulation system to reproduce the realistic traffic conditions. On the other hand, the emulation system benefits from receiving the continuous updates from the simulation system to calibrate the traffi...