OneLab: An open networking laboratory supporting communication Network research across heterogeneous environments

Objective

There are many testbeds available today to support research in communication networks and large scale distributed systems. However, these testbeds tend to be specific. Furthermore, network environments are becoming ever more heterogeneous. Emerging wireless technologies may soon make it common for data to cross multiple wireless hops while being routed in unconventional ways.

These new environments are instrumental to enable the emergence of new architectures, applications and services. For their development and evaluation, there is a recognized lack of evaluation and benchmarking facility. The OneLab project will knit together the best of today's networking testbeds, to provide a unified environment for the next generation of network experiments. The availability of such a large scale, open, heterogeneous testbed will be beneficial not only to the world of research and academics, but industry at large will benefit from access to computing and networking resources.

OneLab will extend the highly successful and widely used PlanetLab infrastructure by enabling deployment of PlanetLab nodes in new wireless environments. Additionally, the capabilities of the PlanetLab platform will be extended in order to allow seamless controlled instantiation of new services, while improving its monitoring capabilities to take into account both networking and system performance issues. In the process, OneLab will create a European testbed administration, and will peer with PlanetLab, maintaining interoperability through a commonly defined set of interfaces.

OneLab, a two-year project, will foster the development of a large-scale and heterogeneous testbed bridged with the successful PlanetLab environment. It will provide services to the research community at large, and add to the ability of European industry (large companies and SMEs alike) to test prototypes of innovative networked applications and speed-up time to market.

Programme(s)

• FP6-IST - Information Society Technologies: thematic priority under the specific programme "Integrating and strengthening the European research area" (2002-2006).

Topic(s)

• IST-2005-2.5.6 - Research networking testbeds

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (9)