Empowering PlanetLab: A Method for TCP Evaluation Over the Planetary-scale Testbed
PlanetLab, the planetary-scale overlay network, has become the de facto platform for conducting network experiments under real-life realistic conditions, scale, and geographic distribution. Many tools have been developed to manage the PlanetLab resources. However, they do not provide extra experimental capabilities to this network. Currently, PlanetLab only allows experiments at the application level, as lower levels (e.g., TCP level) are shared among all users and modifications to, for example, the TCP stack will affect all users’ experiments. In this paper, we present the design of a methodology that allows researchers to implement their new TCP stack, transport algorithms, and protocols on top of PlanetLab. The approach works much like a plug-in that interacts with the PlanetLab nodes without interfering with the operating system or any other running processes. We present a research case study as an example that can make use of such a method to allow for evaluation over PlanetLab. The case study is about testing a new TCP stack, and comparing it to an existing TCP implementation under specific deployment scenarios.