Internet2 Network Research Facilities Project

This was an NSF-funded project exploring new ways to leverage Internet2 facilities and capabilities to support network research.

Project Description

Internet2 and the University of Virginia created an outreach program to enhance and promote the use of high-performance network services for collaborative research and data exchange. By understanding emerging research ideas and the application of new expertise from the computer science and engineering communities, the program defined the scope of recommended services available through Internet2, including the former Abilene Network, the former Abilene Observatory, and the former Internet2 HOPI project. By facilitating access to these services to a broad community of researchers in different disciplines and different locations, enhanced collaborations were likely to occur that might not otherwise exist. This project studied how existing and future NSF investments in research initiatives can be most effectively leveraged and how Internet2 can anticipate and respond to changing trends in discipline-specific research.

A sample of research activities that have used Internet2 facilities follows.

Examples

A large variey of network research projects use Internet2 facilties or are supported by Internet2. The following whitepaper and slides describe some of these projects:

The following four examples describe the range of different types of support for network research projects. They include an extension to the PlanetLab project using MPLS tunnels on the old Abilene network, the Passive Measurement and Analysis Project from NLANR providing a router clamp for an Abilene router node, and the HOPI testbed for exploring next-generation network architectures.

The PlanetLab Extension

PlanetLab is a testbed for overlay networks. PlanetLab nodes are located at over 500 sites around the world, including all eleven router nodes of the Abilene backbone network. Research groups that request PlanetLab participation can experiment with a variety of planetary-scale network devices. Using PlanetLab, researchers are able to experiment with new services under real-world conditions, and at large scale.

The Abilene Observatory and Data Access

The Abilene Observatory provided access to substantial data collections from the Abilene routers. Among other datasets, flow data sets were used to study the types of traffic carried by the network, or determine source-destination matrices for traffic aggregates. An example project is Anukool Lakhina's thesis work in diagnosing network-wide traffic anomalies, that was presented at SIGCOMM 2004. The Abilene flow data was used to test Anukool's algorithms on real data sets.

Direct access to SNMP variables on the routers has been given to projects that require particular sampling rates or access to variables that are not routinely collected. An example project was CAIDA's Bandwidth Estimation project that requires fine-grained polling to more accurately gauge the effectivness of bandwidth estimation algorithms. Access to the SNMP MIBs of routers enabled CAIDA researchers to make a comparison between estimation algorithms and the actual utilization data on the Abilene links.

The NLANR PMA Router Clamp

A router clamp is a collection of passive measurement devices capable of examining the headers of all packets passing through every interface of a router. This is very difficult to achieve on a backbone network where interfaces operate at a rate of typically 10 Gbps. NLANR has installed a router clamp surrounding the Abilene router node located in Indianapolis, IN. The router has three three attached OC-192c backbone circuits and a variety of connector and measurement circuits. Header traces over short periods of time permit an examination of all traffic in and out of the router. The associated data is made available to the network research community.

The HOPI Testbed

The Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project was dedicated to exploring innovative approaches to future network architectures. A design team consisting of network engineers and researchers from the Internet2 community was assembled to create a testbed that examined new architectures for next generation networks. The design team produced a white paper that describes a testbed for circuit and packet switched infrastructures including elements of dynamic provisioning. A corporate advisory team consisting of corporate engineering leaders with experience in optical switching and dynamic provisioning also was formed to support the project. A research advisory panel guided the experimentation on the testbed.

Project PIs
  • Jorg Liebeherr, University of Virginia
  • Rick Summerhill, Internet2
  • Matt Zekauskas, Internet2
Attendance at Meetings

This material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. SCI-0441149. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

 

 

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