PlanetLab: An Overlap Testbed for Disruptive Network Services

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed testbed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. There are currently more than 220 machines at 100 sites world-wide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton and the University of Washington have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing. Many of the results from these experiments are now appearing in such internationally prestigious conferences as ACMs SIGCOMM, SOSP and OSDI.
PlanetLab creates a unique environment in which to conduct experiments at Internet Scale. The most obvious is that network services deployed on PlanetLab experience all of the behaviors of the real Internet where the only thing predictable is unpredictability (latency, bandwidth, paths taken). A second advantage is that PlanetLab provides a diverse perspective on the Internet in terms of connection properties, network presence, and geographical location. The broad perspective on the Internet enables development and deployment of a new class of services that see the network from many different angles.