Overlay Network Assignment in PlanetLab With NetFinder
Yong Zhu, Mostafa Ammar · 2006
Abstract — PlanetLab has been widely used in the networking community to test and deploy user-defined overlays. Serving as a meta testbed to support multiple overlay networks, PlanetLab has significantly lowered the barriers to build new overlays. However, PlanetLab users always face the problem of selecting a set of nodes and interconnecting them to form the desired overlay network. Unfortunately, such a task is usually carried out manually by individual users and sometimes in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we develop NetFinder, an automatic overlay net-work configuration tool to efficiently allocate PlanetLab resources to individual overlays. NetFinder continuously monitors the re-source utilization of PlanetLab and accepts a user-defined overlay topology as input and selects the set of PlanetLab nodes and their interconnection for the user overlay. Experimental results indicate that overlay networks constructed by NetFinder have more stable and significantly higher bandwidth than alternative schemes and near optimal available CPU. I.