The Routerlab - Emulating Internet Characteristics in a Room

Abstract:
Designing infrastructures for automatically conducting controlled, reproducible Internet experiments poses substantial challenges. These include modelling the Internet structure in a useful way, and providing sufficciently Internet-like traffic. In this paper we describe a multi-purpose experimental platform, called Routerlab, enableing complex Internet measurement experimentation. Departing from the approach taken by many popular testbeds, the Routerlab is a router centric, customizable testbed that reflects the macroscopic structure of the Internet, with different clouds and tier levels and simulation of differing access properties via network emulation. This, in combination with a flexible traffic generation framework, enables us to conduct Internet-level experiments on a small scale, within the borders of our server room. Routerlab’s management platform called Labtool supports heterogeneous hardware landscapes and user groups (e.g., labcourse student teams, individual researchers working on differing layers, developers). To accomodate the span of differing requirements of these user groups, it offers both virtualized and bare-metal, non-virtualized resources and can support versioned, controlled changes to the physical topology.