StarBED2: Large-scale, Realistic and Real-time Testbed for Ubiquitous Networks

Nowadays many new technologies are being developed and introduced for Internet, home networks, and sensor networks. The new technologies must be evaluated in detail before deployment. However the above mentioned networks have a large number of nodes and a complicated topology. Therefore it is difficult to analyze such networks using typical network simulators. Accordingly testbeds for these networks must be able to perform accurately emulation of large-scale networks with a complex topology. In order to implement a testbed that satisfies these requirements, we developed a large-scale, realistic and real-time network testbed, StarBED, using hundreds of PCs, and switched networks. We are now implementing StarBED2, which expands StarBED so as to be suitable for emulating ubiquitous networks by introducing several new concepts. In this paper we describe first the present StarBED, its design concept, overall architecture, implemented functionalities, and some of the experiments we performed. Then we introduce StarBED2, its design policy, architecture, and additional components.