An Overview of the AURORA Gigabit Testbed

AURORA is one of five U.S. testbeds charged with exploring applications of, and technologies necessary for, networks operating at gigabit per second or higher bandwidths. AURORA is also an experiment in collaboration, where government support (through the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which is in turn funded by DARPA and the NSF) has spurred interaction among centers of excellence in industry, academia, and government. The emphasis of the AURORA testbed, distinct from the other four testbeds, is research into the supporting technologies for gigabit networking. Our targets include new software architectures, network abstractions, hardware technologies, and applications. This paper provides an overview of the goals and methodologies employed in AURORA, and reports preliminary results from our first year of research. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-93-20. Author(s) David D. Clark, Bruce S. Davie, David J. Farber, Inder S. Gopal, Bharath K. Kadaba, W. David Sincoskie, Jonathan M. Smith, and David L. Tennenhouse This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/462 An Overview of the Aurora Gigabit Testbed MS-CIS-93-20 DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS LAB 18 David D. Clark Bruce S. Davie David J. Farber Illder S. Gopal Bllarath K . Kadaba W. David Sincoskie Jonathan M. Sillit11 David L. Tei~ileilhouse University of Pe~insylvania Scllool of Engineering and Applied Science Con~puter and Ixiformation Science Department