A Performance Perspective on Choosing between Single Aggregate and Multiple Aggregates for GENI Experiments

Abstract

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) provides a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale. It consists of many geographically distributed aggregates for providing computing and networking resources for setting up network experiments. A key design question for GENI experimenters is where they should reserve the resources, and in particular whether they should reserve the resources from a single aggregate or from multiple aggregates. This not only depends on the nature of the experiment, but needs a better understanding of underlying GENI networks as well. This paper studies the performance of GENI networks, with a focus on the tradeoff between single aggregate and multiple aggregates in the design of GENI experiments from the performance perspective. The analysis of data collected will shed light on the decision process for designing GENI experiments.