The performance evaluation of a virtualized programmable edge node for network innovations

Network scientists and engineers have been facing challenges of testing and deploying new Internet architecture in a real-world environment. Recently, Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project aims to address this issue by providing an open platform comprising a suite of highly programmable and shareable network facilities along with its control software. As one type of GENI facilities, Programmable Edge Node (PEN) is designed to provide virtualized computing resources and edge routing services in GENI experiments. This thesis investigates the implementation and performance issues of a PEN prototype and discusses the management of PEN resources. We survey the current testing facilities for network research and point out their limitations. We introduce GENI project and discuss how it is going to address these limitations. We review the previously proposed PEN architecture and discuss the role of PEN in GENI. We present a PEN prototype implementation built with hybrid multi-core processors (x86 and network processors.) and OpenVZ virtualization technology. We then discuss the performance evaluation results obtained from the PEN prototype. After that, we introduce management of PEN resources and discuss how it can be allocated through GENI control framework. We conclude the thesis with the exploration of PEN usage scenarios in network experiments.