Design of an Extensible Network Testbed

Networking testbeds have become an increasingly important part of the networking research cycle. One of the primary reasons for this is that testbeds offer researchers access to network conditions and environments which are very difficult to reproduce in a local laboratory. This work presents the design of the Open Network Laboratory (ONL) testbed. The underlying infrastructure of ONL is general enough to support resource extensibility and heterogeneity at a fundamental level. New types of resources (e.g., multicore PCs, FPGAs, network processors, etc) can be added to the testbed without modifying any testbed infrastructure software. Resource types can also be extended to support multiple distinct sets of functionality (e.g., an FPGA might act as a router, a switch, or a traffic generator). Moreover, users can dynamically add new resource extensions without any modification to the existing infrastructure.