CAIA Research Seminars Close Window
Title: NorNet - An Open, Large-Scale Testbed for Multi-Homed Systems
Speaker: Thomas Dreibholz, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
Date: 10:30am, 30th Jan 2014
Venue: EN615, Level 6, EN Building
Abstract: Multi-homing denotes the simultaneous connection of endpoints (e.g. cloud servers, smartphones, etc.) to multiple Internet Service Providers (ISP). That is, the endpoints remain reachable even when some of the ISPs have problems (e.g. malfunction of hardware or break of cables). Besides the redundancy aspect, multi-homing can also make load sharing by multi-path transport possible, i.e. increasing the application throughput by utilising multiple paths simultaneously. Multi-path transport can e.g. be realised by Concurrent Multi-Path Transfer for SCTP (CMT-SCTP) and Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), two protocols that are currently under standardisation in the IETF.

The growing need for and deployment of multi-homed applications makes large-scale testing and evaluation in realistic Internet setups necessary. For instance, different paths can have very different characteristics with regard to bandwidth, packet loss rate, congestion, delay and jitter. Therefore, the NorNet project of the Simula Research Laboratory is building up an open platform for such experiments: the NorNet testbed. It provides programmable nodes with multiple ISP connections -- wired as well as wireless -- that are distributed all over Norway as well as some international locations. This talk will give an overview over NorNet with a focus on its usage for research on multi-path transport. Particularly, it will also show how the NorNet testbed can be utilised for research at CAIA/Swinburne University.

Biography: Priv.-Doz. Dr. Thomas Dreibholz is working at the Simula Research Laboratory since May 2012. His main responsibilities include the development and establishment of -- as well as research on multi-path transport in -- the NorNet testbed. He has received his Diplom (Dipl.-Inform.) degree in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany in 2001. Furthermore, he has received his Ph.D. degree (Dr. rer. nat.) in 2007 as well as his Habilitation (Priv.-Doz.) degree in 2012 from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany. He has published and presented more than 50 research contributions at international conferences and in journals, on the topics of Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool), the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and Quality of Service (QoS). Furthermore, he has contributed multiple Working Group and Individual Submission Drafts to the IETF standardisation processes of RSerPool and SCTP. He is also co-author of multiple RFC documents published by the IETF. In addition, he has written the RSerPool reference implementation.
Downloads: Slides
Last Updated: Friday 31-Jan-2014 15:02:07 AEDT | Maintained by: Jason But (jbut@swin.edu.au) | Authorised by: Grenville Armitage ( garmitage@swin.edu.au)