This past week I had the pleasure of presenting at CNERT 2015: "Computer and Networking Experimental Research using Testbeds", which was held in conjunction with ICDCS: "International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems". Sponsored by NSF-GENI, CNERT's aim is to advance experimental research and testbed technologies. Presenters spoke about technologies utilizing a wide range of testbeds including GENI, DeterLab, Emulab, and FIRE federated testbeds. Authors were strongly encouraged to include live demonstrations and present technologies that promoted experiment repeatability and reproducibility on real systems.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Peter Steenkiste presented XIA, a future Internet architecture and detailed their testbed-based evaluation of XIA. Presentations in the workshop fell into three major topics: Experimental Research and Platform Support, Software Defined Networks, and research done using the GENI testbed.

Our paper, "Expressing Different Traffic Models Using The LegoTG Framework", won the best paper award at CNERT. In our paper and presentation, we demonstrated the ease of generating and modifying background traffic in testbed experiments through our LegoTG Framework. Our framework makes it easy to combine different traffic generators and traffic modulators (e.g., delay models), and to port the same background traffic to different topologies. In addition to the LegoTG framework, we have developed several traffic generation/modulation tools that can be used in LegoTG to generate realistic and highly controllable network and transport-level traffic. Our demonstration centered on a series of simple experiments, which reinforce how much background traffic matters in experiments, and how different traffic models can drastically affect experiment results and research conclusions.

To learn more about LegoTG or to try out our software, go to the LegoTG project page at:  http://steel.isi.edu/Projects/legoTG

The CNERT program can be found at:  http://cnert2015.csec.rit.edu

~gen