StarBED and SpringOS: large-scale general purpose network testbed and supporting software

New technologies for the Internet should be evaluated on environments dedicated to experiments, in order to avoid influences to critical services on the Internet. Generally software simulation and small testbed using real nodes are used to satisfy these requirements. There are several stages in developing new technologies, however, and these technologies may not satisfy requirements for all stages.We pointed the gap between the Internet and environment for experiment, especially in aspects of scale, complexity and reality. We proposed and implemented StarBED which is a testbed based on lots of actual nodes, in order to build large-scale, complex and realistic environments for experiments. StarBED consists of 512 PCs and switches which connect these PCs. The PCs on StarBED are designed to run 10 virtual PCs on a physical PC. It enables to build a topology for experiments using up to 5120 nodes. It is difficult to manage and control such a lot of nodes. We also designed and implemented SpringOS, which is a supporting software for making experiments. SpringOS makes the topology and drives the scenario for experiment according to the user's configuration automatically.Many experiments were performed on StarBED, and this shows StarBED's effectiveness.