OneLab: An Open Networking Laboratory Supporting Communication Network Research Across Heterogeneous Environments

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. 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. 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 ran from September 2006 to August 2008, financed by a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) grant of 1.9 million euros and a total budget of 2.9 million euros for a consortium of ten partners.