Using PlanetLab for network research: Myths, realities, and best practices

PlanetLab is a research testbed that supports 428 experiments on 276 sites, with 583 nodes in 30 countries. It has lowered the barrier to distributed experimentation in network measurement, peer-to-peer networks, content distribution

Decentralized trust management and accountability in federated systems

In this paper, we describe three key problems for trust management in federated systems and present a layered architecture for addressing them. The three problems we address include how to express and verify trust in a flexible and scalable manner, how to monitor the use of trust relationships over time, and how to manage and reevaluate trust relationships based on historical traces of past behavior. While previous work provides the basis for expressing and verifying trust, it does not address the concurrent problems of how to continuously monitor and manage trust relationships over time. These problems close the loop on trust management and are especially relevant in the context of federated systems where remote resources can be acquired across multiple administrative domains and used in potentially undesirable ways (e.g., to launch denial-ofservice attacks)

Wanted: Systems Abstractions for SDN

This paper presents a case for applying the principles of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to middleboxes and end hosts. The challenges of configuring networking on network hosts resemble those addressed by SDN – numerous multi-vendor components, each with its own syntax and idiosyncratic corner cases, must be orchestrated smoothly. We have developed a prototype called NativeClick, a novel use of the Click Modular Router language, to orchestrate Linux networking tools. NativeClick demonstrates that, while existing SDN efforts have produced insufficient Abstractions to cover a wide range of networking behavior, SDN-like abstractions can make host configurations modular

A routing underlay for overlay networks

We argue that designing overlay services to independently probe the Internet—with the goal of making informed application-specific routing decisions—is an untenable strategy. Instead, we propose a shared routing underlay that overlay services query. We posit that this underlay must adhere to two high-level principles. First, it must take cost (in terms of network probes) into account. Second, it must be layered so that specialized routing services can be built from a set of basic primitives. These principles lead to an underlay design where lower layers expose large-scale, coarse-grained static information already collected by the network, and upper layers perform more frequent probes over a narrow set of nodes. This paper proposes a set of primitive operations and three library routing services that can be built on top of them, and describes how such libraries could be useful to overlay services. 1