Abstract

The DComp Testbed effort has built a large-scale testbed, combining customized nodes and commodity switches with modular software to launch the Merge open source testbed ecosystem. Adopting EVPN routing, DCompTB employs a flexible and highly adaptable strategy to provision network emulation and infrastructure services on a per-experiment basis. Leveraging a clean separation of the experiment creation process into realization at the Merge portal and materialization on the DCompTB site, the testbed implementation embraces modularity throughout. This enables a well-defined orchestration system and an array of reusable modular tools to perform all essential functions of the DCompTB. Future work will evaluate the robustness, performance and maintainability of this testbed design as it becomes heavily used by research teams to evaluate opportunistic edge computing prototypes.

Date

March 15, 2026

Authors

Ryan Goodfellow, Stephen Schwab, Erik Kline, Lincoln Thurlow, Geoff Lawler

Conference

12th USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET 19)