FABRIC Testbed from the Eyes of a Network Researcher

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to show how to deploy routing protocols in the FABRIC national-scale testbed, presenting examples step-by-step from the perspective of a network researcher who needs to book a slice composed of a topology with multiple paths, diversity of links, nodes with specific network interfaces (shared or/and programmable NICs) that form the basis to build a real-world network experiment. The second is to use the available tools (“metaresearch” API) to demonstrate how reproducible is the experimentation process, taking the evaluation of OSPF failure recovery and traffic throughput over dedicated smartNICS as use cases.