One of the primary limiting factors to improving the security, robustness, and performance of the global computation and communication infrastructure is the difficulty of subjecting novel protocols, applications, and services to realistic network conditions, at scale. Recent advancements in emulation technology enable running unmodified applications on stock hardware and operating systems. These applications can be accurately subject to the wide-area communication characteristics of topologies consisting of tens of thousands of routers and 10 Gigabits per second of aggregate bandwidth. Given these advancements, the principal challenge in carrying out realistic large-scale experiments lies in what to emulate rather than how to emulate it. The community currently lacks the ability to: i) generate topologies that reflect important characteristics of the Internet, ii) annotate the topologies with link capacities, latencies, and loss rates, and iii) subject a given topology to realistic levels of background traffic.
The goal of this proposal is to develop a unified infrastructure for creating realistic network topologies and to accurately annotate them with appropriate distributions for bandwidths, latencies, and round trip times. Further, it will be possible to subject individual topology links to realistic packet arrival processes.
Broader Impact: Taken together, the components of this proposal have the potential to effect a qualitative change in the community's ability to conduct controlled experiments that accurately reflect a variety of both current and future network scenarios. Such ability will then dramatically accelerate the
