Towards a cost-effective networking testbed

The Internet is suffering from ossification. There has been substantial research on improving current protocols, but the vendors are reluctant to deploy new ones. We believe that this is in part due to the difficulty of evaluating protocols under realistic conditions. Recent wide-area testbeds can help alleviate this problem, but they require substantial resources (equipment, bandwidth) from each participant, and they have difficulty in providing repeatability and full control over the experiments. Existing in-house networking testbeds are capable of running controlled, repeatable experiments, but are typically small-scale (due to various overheads), limited in features, or expensive.

The premise of our work is that it is possible to leverage the recent increases in computational power to improve the researchers' ability to experiment with new protocols in lab settings. We propose a cost-effective testbed, called MX, which emulates many programmable routers running over a realistic topology on multi-core commodity servers. We leverage open source implementations of programmable routers, such as Click, and modify them to allow coexistence of multiple instances in the same kernel in an effort to reduce packet forwarding overheads. Our initial results show that we outperform similar cost-effective solutions by a factor of 2. Next, we demonstrate that grouping and placing routers on to cores which share the L2 cache yields high performance.