Network Traffic as a Federated Testbed Service

We describe a prototype of Science Traffic as a Service (STAAS), a decentralized, cooperative system to collect, filter and distribute a diverse collection of real and synthetic data traffic to the global experimental research testbed user community. Available on-demand to networking experimenters through a web dashboard, the tool promises to elevate traffic selection and distribution to a first class experimental instrumentation resource. We believe the alternatives to providing this service on large-scale federated testbeds are increasingly unworkable for experimenters. As backbone networks increasingly deploy 100–1000 Gbps communications links we are moving beyond the point where experimenters can reasonably be asked to independently, safely, and efficiently create test traffic that provides the realism that their investigations will demand. We seek to deploy our prototype at campuses and testbeds attached to the emerging FABRIC mid-scale networking research infrastructure. We describe prototype design, operation and implementation, and how it is integrated with existing campus networking infrastructure. We explain how remote experimenters will request and acquire network traffic to study. We detail our process for forwarding campus traffic onto the experimental testbed, while striving to preserve both the timing integrity of the flows and the data privacy of their payloads. ^†