Flux Research Group / School of Computing

Toward Replayable Research in Networking and Systems

Eric Eide

Position paper for Archive '10, the NSF Workshop on Archiving Experiments to Raise Scientific Standards (Archive) 2010.

areas
Testbeds

abstract

The increasing use of data repositories, testbeds, and experiment-management systems shows that the networking and systems research communities are moving in the direction of repeatability. We assert, however, that the goal of these communities should not be repeatable research, but “replayable” research. Beyond encapsulating the definition and history of an experiment, a replayable experiment is associated with a mechanism for actually re-executing a system under test. In this paper, we outline the challenges to be overcome in building an archive of replayable experiments in computer networking and systems research.