PeerLab: A network testbed for enabling experiments in edge network environment

Network testbeds for developing, deploying, and experimenting with new network services have evolved as recent rapid progress in virtualization technology. This paper proposes a new testbed for enabling experiments with end-systems, or peers, at the edge, often located in private networks behind firewalls. The existing testbeds such as PlanetLab and CoreLab consist of only nodes in the public Internet, since it is often hard to manage nodes behind firewalls. In our proposed testbed, we reserve a set of virtual machines on peers often behind firewall and manage them using a virtual private network over them to create an environment where we can upload arbitrary programs to conduct experiments with distributed systems such as peer-to-peer applications. We report our experiences of developing such a network testbed and demonstrate how we can conduct experiments such as simple latency and bandwidth measurements and peer-to-peer applications.