High-fidelity interdomain routing experiments

Abstract

The PEERING research platform lets researchers exchange actual BGP routes and traffic with hundreds of networks. To date, several researchers have used PEERING to perform interdomain routing experiments. However, PEERING's original design sends experiment data-plane traffic through a VPN, introducing latency and jitter, hindering the applicability of the platform to performance-sensitive experiments. In this work, we propose extensions to PEERING to allow researchers to run applications inside containers on PEERING routers, mitigating performance degradation on dataplane traffic and empowering new classes of experiments. Our goals include strong isolation between experiments and flexible routing to steer traffic in and out of containers.