In VINI Veritas: Realistic And Controlled Network Experimentation

Abstract

This paper describes <i>VINI</i>, a virtual network infrastructure that allows network researchers to evaluate their protocols and services in a realistic environment that also provides a high degree of control over network conditions. VINI allows researchers to deploy and evaluate their ideas with real routing software, traffic loads, and network events. To provide researchers flexibility in designing their experiments, VINI supports simultaneous experiments with arbitrary network topologies on a shared physical infrastructure. This paper tackles the following important design question: What set of concepts and techniques facilitate flexible, realistic, and controlled experimentation (<i>e.g.</i>, multiple topologies and the ability to tweak routing algorithms) on a fixed physical infrastructure? We first present VINI's high-level design and the challenges of virtualizing a single network. We then present <i>PL-VINI</i>, an implementation of VINI on PlanetLab, running the "Internet In a Slice". Our evaluation of PL-VINI shows that it provides a realistic and controlled environment for evaluating new protocols and services.