Design of an Extensible Network Testbed with Heterogeneous Components

Virtualized network infrastructures are currently deployed in both research and commercial contexts. The complexity of the virtualization layer varies greatly in different deployments, ranging from cloud computing environments, to carrier Ethernet applications using stacked VLANs, to networking testbeds. In all of these cases, there are many users sharing the resources of one provider, where each user expects their resources to be isolated from all other users. Our work in this area is focused on network testbeds. In particular, we present the design of the latest version of the Open Network Laboratory (ONL) testbed. This redesign generalizes the underlying infrastructure to support resource extensibility and heterogeneity at a fundamental level. New types of resources (e.g., multicore PCs, FPGAs, network processors, etc) can be added to the testbed without modifying any testbed infrastructure software. Resource types can also be extended to support multiple distinct sets of functionality (e.g., an FPGA might act as a router, a switch, or a traffic generator). Moreover, users can dynamically add new resource extensions without any modification to the existing infrastructure