Workshops Archive

Network Replay and Consistency Across Testbeds

Workshop: The 12th Annual International Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS)

Authors: Alexander Wolosewicz (Illinois Institute of Technology), Vinod Yegneswaran and Ashish Gehani (SRI), and Nik Sultana (Illinois Institute of Technology)

Abstract: Shared network testbeds are critical for systems and networking research. However, their shared hardware can introduce variability—like increased jitter or loss—that may impact experiment fidelity or reproducibility.

We present Choir, the first 100 Gbps replay tool designed to run on commodity hardware and shared infrastructures. Choir enables precise replay and measurement to observe how closely a testbed reproduces expected behavior. We also introduce a metric for quantifying consistency, designed to support comparison across time, configurations, and environments.

We evaluate our approach on FABRIC and a local, bare-metal testbed. We show that FABRIC, even with dedicated resources and low background utilization, has greater variability in inter-packet arrival times and latency compared to the local testbed. With high utilization on shared hardware, this variability increases by an order of magnitude. Our findings demonstrate how tools like Choir can help researchers better understand and mitigate the effects of shared infrastructure.

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