Creating Future Networks: Designing, Implementing and Operating Advanced Experimental Network Research Testbeds

For many years, experimental network research test beds have been designed and implemented to explore theoretical concepts at scale, progressing beyond ideas that initially may have been explored through lab simulation and modeling. However, traditionally, such test beds almost always were created for specific, highly defined projects, and they were designed to last for fairly short periods of time. More recently, network research communities have been designing, implementing, and operating new types of large scale experimental network test beds, including those global in scope, which are intended to be long term persistent resources and can support multiple types of experiments. These test beds reflect recent innovations in architecture and in core technologies and also the declining cost curves of basic components, a trend which is reducing the economic barriers to developing test beds. This paper presents several key ideas motivating the creation of next generation test beds and it describes design concepts, core technologies, and operational issues. This paper also describes a number of recent and current large scale test beds that have been created to advance the state of communications, especially those designed to assist in providing a transition to the future Internet.