PlanetLab has significantly lowered the barriers to deploying overlays. This paper describes how to lower them further by introducing a general data plane for overlay networks. Researchers can plug their own control planes into this data plane to easily run fully functional overlays on PlanetLab, and students can use the overlay data plane as a hands-on tool for learning about internetworking concepts. The overlay data plane is the first step in the “Internet In A Slice” project, which will let members of the PlanetLab community experiment with virtual Internets running on PlanetLab.
Andy C. Bavier, Mark Huang, Larry L. Peterson