Container-Based Unified Testbed for Information-Centric Networking

To develop and evaluate diverse ICN protocols and applications, large-scale and extensible testbeds that facilitate realistic evaluations must be designed and deployed. We propose a container-based unified testbed for ICN, called CUTEi, which employs the Linux container lightweight virtualization mechanism to build testbed nodes. CUTEi enables testbed users to run applications and protocols for ICN in two experimentation modes using two different container designs: application-level experimentation using a "common container," and network-level experimentation using a "user container." CUTEi also implements an "on-filesystem cache" to allocate caching data on a UNIX filesystem and share the cached data with multiple containers. Thus far we have deployed the CUTEi testbed on nine sites and performed experiments using CCNx components on the testbed. Consequently, we have found that it is easy to coordinate experiments on CUTEi; further, a comparison of its data fetch performance with that of PlanetLab indicates that CUTEi is more stable for ICN experiments than PlanetLab.