Experiments with the Emulated NDN Testbed in ONL

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a recently proposed information-centric network architecture. The NDN Testbed is a global infrastructure that enables real-world NDN demonstrations. However, deploying new applications directly on the NDN Testbed requires considerable operational support and may introduce instability to shared testbed infrastructure. What's more, network performance parameters cannot be easily modified on the NDN Testbed to study application behaviors. As a result, an emulated NDN testbed, and one over which developers have full control, can benefit testing, debugging, and evaluating new NDN applications and services as a complement and precursor to testbed deployment. In this demonstration, we present the emulated NDN testbed that runs in the Open Network Laboratory (ONL). The emulated testbed runs on real servers (there is no simulation) and uses the same NDN forwarding daemon, NFD, and the same routing software, NLSR, that are used in the NDN Testbed; this minimizes the efforts required of developers to evaluate their applications. We show how the flexibility of ONL enables the study of application behaviors in varying network environments and conditions. We also use a data collection application to demonstrate the effectiveness of using the emulated testbed to support application development.