The WAN in Lab (WiL) Project

The WAN in Lab Project was introduced by the Networking Lab at the California Institute of Technology led by Professor Steven Low with support from leading faculty and students as well as Cisco Networking. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0303620.

WAN-in-Lab has a 2400+km long haul fiber optic test bed, located in a single laboratory, to allow detailed control and measurement. Initially built to aid FAST TCP research, WAN-in-Lab is now used for a variety of networking research and is being equipped to provide a publicly available TCP benchmarking facility. This includes a dynamically reconfigurable array of Cisco 7609 routers and ONS 15454's interconnected via OC-48, GbE and 10GbE links, using a Calient MEMS optical switch.

This will provide an important complement to existing testbeds using emulated networks (such as dummynet) by providing real propagation delay and active real-time monitoring.

Students use WiL - July 2008 More Caltech students utilize WAN-in-Lab over summer. TCP evaluation & benchmarking discussion at Caltech - 8-9 Nov 2007 TCP evaluation and benchmarking: round table discussion was hosted by WAN-in-Lab at Caltech. Some findings from these discussions were presented at PFLDnet2008 in March 2008. WiL Media Wiki - May 2007 A Media Wiki has been added to the WAN-in-Lab website, to assist with documentation. WAN-in-Lab is connected to Ultralight - January 4, 2007 One of the long-term goals of the WAN-in-Lab team was to connect to the Ultralight network testbed used by high energy physicists. WAN-in-Lab now has a 10Gbps connection, through Ultralight's presence in Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Resources. This will allow much greater flexibility, and offer the possibility of running experiments in the presence of live cross-traffic. View More News about WiL