Studying Characteristics of an Emulab Testbed for Scientifically Rigorous Experiments

Emulation test beds are increasingly used to study the Internet. In this paper we briefly review various characteristics of a test bed based on the Emulab software that are necessary to conduct scientifically rigorous experiments: experiment fidelity and repeatability as well as measurement accuracy and interference. Our results indicate that the current trend of using emulation test beds is justified as both realistic and efficient. We show that Emulab-based configurations are representative of real systems in terms of emerging behavior (qualitative) and that repeatable experiments are possible.