Evaluating Evolutionary IP-Based Transport Services on a Dark Fiber Large-Scale Network Testbed

Abstract

Though once a research platform, today’s Internet cannot serve as a testbed for direct experimentation due to its distributed ownership and its driving business functions. An alternative vehicle is needed to enable researchers to investigate new network architectures, services and functionalities. By deploying an highly over-provisioned metropolitan fiber ring and placing on it, at strategic locations, a collection of flexible MPLS-enabled network nodes, shareable in a seamless way for production and research, we created an overlay network testbed that can be used for testing in a real environment all the new networking technologies and services based on MPLS prior to their introduction in production environment. We describe the most significant experiences gathered from implementing the above technologies and the lessons learned in a form intended to assist others in realizing evolutionary services in production networks and organizing successful high-performance network testbeds.