The power of the national information infrastructure has expanded enormously over the last decade. Commercial Internet service and government-sponsored advanced networks for research and education support a range of national priorities. Unfortunately, rapid development and deployment of robust, adaptive network software is hampered by a fundamental obstacle: prototype systems are difficult to evaluate due to scale and complexity of their host environment---the Internet.
This proposal seeks to remove this obstacle by constructing a software environment for evaluating prototype network software systems under realistic, controlled, repeatable conditions through scalable Internet emulation. The proposed system, ModelNet, emulates a wide-area network on a high-speed cluster, enabling researchers to deploy unmodified software prototypes in a configurable Internet-like environment and subject them to faults and varying network conditions.
This research will first investigate techniques for scaling network emulation to thousands of unmodified applications with aggregate communication bandwidth of over 10 Gb/s. Second, it will enable the community to leverage large-scale network emulation as a primary technique for rapidly developing and evaluating next-generation Internet services and applications. Finally, the research will seek fundamental improvements in network service robustness and performance by providing a controlled environment for subjecting network services to a range of realistic deployment scenarios.
