Building Diverse Networks with the Open Network Lab
by Patrick Crowley, pcrowley@wustl.edu, http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~pcrowley
   Applied Research Laboratory, Washington University in St. Louis

The closed, proprietary nature of commercial networking platforms have
made it difficult for researchers to demonstrate their innovations and
prototypes to industrial partners in a directly compelling way. Large
networking testbeds such as PlanetLab have enabled researchers to
evaluate and demonstrate their ideas at scale, but only on personal
computer-based platforms which lack the performance levels and
technology components expected of commercial networking products. To
help bridge this gap, we have developed an open, high-performance
networking platform which consists of standard Advanced Telecom
Computing Architecture (ATCA) components. Since the platform makes use
of the technology components typically found in commercial devices,
such as 1/10 Gigabit links, network processors, general-purpose
processors, and diverse memory systems such as fast DRAMs, SRAMs, and
large ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs), researchers are
able to demonstrate their research contributions in a way that allows
industrial partners to see how the same ideas might work on their own
proprietary platforms.

However, the cost and management burdens of such systems represent a
major challenge to most academic research groups. To enable the
broadest possible usage, we are making these platforms available
through Washington University's Open Network Laboratory (ONL), an
Internet-accessible networking research laboratory. 

In this presentation, we will briefly describe the design of our open
networking platform and discuss how it enables innovative networking
research through the Open Network Lab.