PlanetLab has been widely used in the networking
community to test and deploy user-defined overlays. Serving as
a meta testbed to support multiple overlay networks, PlanetLab
has significantly lowered the barriers to build new overlays.
However, PlanetLab users always face the problem of selecting
a set of nodes and interconnecting them to form the desired
overlay network. Unfortunately, such a task is usually carried out
manually by individual users and sometimes in an ad-hoc manner.
In this paper, we develop NetFinder, an automatic overlay network
configuration tool to efficiently allocate PlanetLab resources
to individual overlays. NetFinder continuously monitors the resource
utilization of PlanetLab and accepts a user-defined overlay
topology as input and selects the set of PlanetLab nodes and
their interconnection for the user overlay. Experimental results
indicate that overlay networks constructed by NetFinder have
more stable and significantly higher bandwidth than alternative
schemes and near optimal available CPU
