An Architecture for International Federation of Network Testbeds

Abstract

Testbeds play a key role in the advancement of network science and the exploration of new network architectures. Because the scale and scope of any individual testbed is necessarily limited, federation is a useful technique for constructing testbeds that serve a wide range of experimenter needs. In a federated testbed, individual facilities maintain local autonomy while cooperating to provide a unified set of abstractions and interfaces to users. Forming an international federation is particularly challenging, because issues of trust, user access policy, and local laws and regulations are of greater concern that they are for federations within a single country. In this paper, we describe an architecture, based on the US National Science Foundation's GENI project, that is capable of supporting the needs of an international federation.