The EdgeNet System

EdgeNet is the prototype of a scalable, sustainable general-purpose testbed for very wide area distributed systems and extremely low-latency distributed services. In this, it is aimed at the same experimenters and systems that formed the core usage of previous, highly-successful wide-area testbeds such as PlanetLab [1], G-Lab [2], V-Node [5], GENI [4], and SAVI [3], and it incorporates many of the features that characterized those previous testbeds. EdgeNet’s goal is to achieve the usability and research value of the previous generations of wide area testbed, whilst offering radical improvements in the scalability and sustainability of those systems. It achieves this scalability and sustainability through a strategy of using industry-standard open-source software as the basis of its software stack, and by a strategy of hardwarefree, bottom-up, site-driven deployment. EdgeNet follows the Seattle [6] and PlanetIgnite [9] strategy of permitting sites to join the testbed with purely local action.