Evaluating Global-scale Distributed Systems using Scalable Network Emulation

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The power of the national information infrastructure has expandedenormously over the last decade. Commercial Internet service andgovernment-sponsored advanced networks for research and educationsupport a range of national priorities. Unfortunately, rapiddevelopment and deployment of robust, adaptive network software ishampered by a fundamental obstacle: prototype systems are difficult toevaluate due to scale and complexity of their host environment---theInternet. This proposal seeks to remove this obstacle by constructing a softwareenvironment for evaluating prototype network software systems underrealistic, controlled, repeatable conditions through scalable Internetemulation. The proposed system, ModelNet, emulates a wide-areanetwork on a high-speed cluster, enabling researchers to deployunmodified software prototypes in a configurable Internet-likeenvironment and subject them to faults and varying network conditions. This research will first investigate techniques for scaling networkemulation to thousands of unmodified applications with aggregatecommunication bandwidth of over 10 Gb/s. Second, it will enable thecommunity to leverage large-scale network emulation as a primarytechnique for rapidly developing and evaluating next-generationInternet services and applications. Finally, the research will seekfundamental improvements in network service robustness and performanceby providing a controlled environment for subjecting network servicesto a range of realistic deployment scenarios.