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A remotely accessible network processor-based router for network experimentation

Published: 06 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Over the last decade, programmable Network Processors (NPs) have become widely used in Internet routers and other network components. NPs enable rapid development of complex packet processing functions as well as rapid response to changing requirements. In the network research community, the use of NPs has been limited by the challenges associated with learning to program these devices and with using them for substantial research projects. This paper reports on an extension to the Open Network Laboratory testbed that seeks to reduce these "barriers to entry" by providing a complete and highly configurable NP-based router that users can access remotely and use for network experiments. The base router includes support for IP route lookup and general packet filtering, as well as a flexible queueing sub-system and extensive support for performance monitoring. In addition, it provides a plugin environment that can be used to extend the router's functionality, enabling users to carry out significant network experiments with a relatively modest investment of time and effort. This paper describes our NP router and explains how it can be used. We provide several examples of network experiments that have been implemented using the plugin environment, and provide some baseline performance data to characterize the overall system performance. We also report that these routers have already been used for ten non-trivial projects in an advanced architecture course where most of the students had no prior experience using NPs.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANCS '08: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems
    November 2008
    191 pages
    ISBN:9781605583464
    DOI:10.1145/1477942
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 06 November 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. network processors
    2. network testbeds
    3. programmable routers

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    ANCS '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 67 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 314 submissions, 28%

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    • (2018)Decoupling information and connectivity via information-centric transportProceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking10.1145/3267955.3267963(54-66)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2018
    • (2018)Bayesian factor analysis and performance measurement of the Linux forwarding architectureProceedings of the 2018 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems10.1145/3230718.3230726(28-40)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2018
    • (2017)Controlling Strategy Retransmissions in Named Data NetworkingProceedings of the Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems10.1109/ANCS.2017.17(70-81)Online publication date: 18-May-2017
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    • (2016)Forwarding Strategies for Applications in Named Data NetworkingProceedings of the 2016 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems10.1145/2881025.2889475(111-112)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2016
    • (2016)The Second Named Data Networking Community Meeting (NDNcomm 2015)ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/2875951.287596146:1(58-63)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
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