TORI: User Provided Future Networking Testbeds

The usage of testbeds is considered a key tool for exploring the development of new protocols and network architectures in the area of network research. Testbeds, together with simulations, are the basic tool set of network researchers to drive research, but often it is impossible to get feedback from real deployments and their respective data traffic. Today's major testbed facilities, e.g., VINI and PlanetLab, aim at emulating the behavior of large-scale networks, but they are still several orders of magnitude smaller than the deployed operational network infrastructure. We argue that it is time to extend network research beyond theoretical and testbed approaches towards a dynamic, peer-to-peer based testbed environment, similar to the approach taken by seti@home and BOINC. We aim at expanding the total number of participating nodes in an experiment and at experimenting on existing operational infrastructure with its entirely uncontrollable environment. Our vision presented in this paper, the Testbed on Real Infrastructure (TORI), includes regular end hosts (peers) in an experiment by deploying and executing the experimental software on these peers and to form an overlay network upon them. The main difference of our TORI approach compared to others is installing new technologies and testing them with the operational infrastructure.