Summary: Experience with an Evolving Overlay Network Testbed
David G. Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, M. Frans Kaashoek, Robert Morris
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
fdga,hari,kaashoek,rtmg@lcs.mit.edu
http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/ron/
ABSTRACT
The MIT RON testbed consists of 36 Internet­connected nodes
at 31 different sites. It has been in operation for two years.
This paper presents an overview of the testbed, summarizes
some of the research for which it has proved useful, and
presents the lessons we learned during its development. The
testbed has been useful both for our own research and for that
of external researchers because of its heterogeneous, diverse
network connections; its homogenous hardware and software
platform; its incremental, bottom­up development; and its easy
configuration and management tools.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the fall of 1999, we embarked on a project to improve the
resilience of distributed Internet services to faults and prob­
lems in the underlying IP routing substrate. Our approach was

Source: Andersen, Dave - School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences