Characterizing the GENI Networks

After several spirals of development, GENI has evolved into a rich-featured environment with comprehensive support. Researchers have started to use it as a testing environment for their research projects, as evidenced by new GENI projects on shakedown experiments. However, it is not clear what we can expect from the GENI testbeds from a performance perspective. Some fundamental questions we can ask are: What are the bandwidth and latency of a link that connects two VMs from two different GENI aggregates? Do they change a lot over time? What kind of distribution do they follow? Are they aggregate dependent? The goal of this study is to characterize the links of the GENI networks and provide guidance to GENI experimenters. The information collected can be helpful for designing GENI experiments in selecting where resources should be reserved.