WAN-in-Lab: Motivation, deployment and experiments

WAN-in-Lab is a hardware testbed for the design, development, testing and evaluation of high speed network protocols. It uses real carrier-class networking hardware to avoid the artifacts introduced by network simulation and emulation, while being localized to allow detailed measurement of network performance. WAN-in-Lab is an open resource, available for use by the networking community. This paper describes the structure of WAN-in-Lab and the rationale behind it, issues encountered, and experimental results that illustrate its applications.