Building A Robust and Economical Internet Testbed: 6PlanetLab

Building a robust and economical Internet testbed contributes a lot to the study, the use, and the deployment of new Internet technologies. In this paper, we present our experience on building such a testbed in China, named 6PlanetLab. To achieve better robustness, we design and implement a mechanism for semi automatical fail-over and a slice-integrated interface for fault-tolerance. To increase cost-efficiency, we adopt greedy sharing mechanism to leverage all available resources and develop simple but strong tools to save management cost. The six-month running data of 6PlanetLab demonstrate the success of our design. We believe 6PlanetLab is a good paradigm for other communities.