A testbed for the twenty-first century

With the spread of networking, the increasing power of the personal computer, the availability of information at the click of a button, and the emergence of the Internet as a potential competitor for traditional telecommunications traffic, the pace of change in the telecommunications field has never been faster. Moreover, network traffic patterns for the growing data services are highly unpredictable. Mix these circumstances in uncertain proportion with traditional "telephony" services over a common infrastructure and we have a recipe for potential disaster. Against this background, it is becoming ever more difficult to make the right investment decisions for a future infrastructure. In response to these uncertainties, we describe our work on building a "futures" testbed. The aim of this work is to provide a research platform on which to build aspects of the future today and so help guide strategic planning. This paper describes selected aspects of our diverse range of work, which span link-layer technologies, lower layer protocol issues, management and operations, and applications. In particular, we provide an overview of the network infrastructure, a more detailed description of work on implementing local-area network emulation with multicast a discussion of quality of service, and an example application domain with our work on electronic commerce.