NorNet Core – A multi-homed research testbed

AbstractOver the last decade, the Internet has grown at a tremendous speed in both size and complexity. Nowadays, a large number of important services – for instance e-commerce, healthcare and many others – depend on the availability of the underlying network. Clearly, service interruptions due to network problems may have a severe impact. On the long way towards the Future Internet, the complexity will grow even further. Therefore, new ideas and concepts must be evaluated thoroughly, and particularly in realistic, real-world Internet scenarios, before they can be deployed for production networks. For this purpose, various testbeds – for instance PlanetLab, GpENI or G-Lab – have been established and are intensively used for research. However, all of these testbeds lack the support for so-called multi-homing.Multi-homing denotes the connection of a site to multiple Internet service providers, in order to achieve redundancy. Clearly, with the need for network availability, there is a steadily growing demand for multi-homing. The idea of the NorNet Core project is to establish a Future Internet research testbed with multi-homed sites, in order to allow researchers to perform experiments with multi-homed systems. Particular use cases for this testbed include realistic experiments in the areas of multi-path routing, load balancing, multi-path transport protocols, overlay networks and network resilience. In this paper, we introduce the NorNet Core testbed as well as its architecture