NTS: A Scalable Virtual Testbed Architecture with Dynamic Scheduling and Backpressure

Experimental platforms perform a key role in evaluating the proof-of-concept and innovations. Nowadays, researchers from academia and industries rely on expensive physical testbeds to evaluate their experiments, while there are very limited software testbeds in market, which usually not available or costly. In addition, the applications of existing traffic generators are restricted to their single function and performance in network area. It has come to a point that lack of validation and testing tools has tremendously jeopardized the innovation in this field. In this paper, we propose NTS, which is a scalable software-based virtual testbed architecture. The scheduling and management framework can dynamically schedule resource of services. The scheduling algorithm adopts the concept of cost proportional fairness scheduling, which takes the evaluated traffic proportion and packet arrival rate into account. By leveraging container technology, the resources of services are restrictedly managed and fully isolated without tampering the OS kernel’s scheduling mechanisms. Another advantage of the proposed testbed architecture is that the software can generate most kinds of backbone network traffic and can also be extended easily for customized protocol or traffic patterns. Our experiments show that the virtual testbed is generic scalable and cost-efficient, which is suitable and affordable for researchers in the field of network.