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HEN - Heterogeneous Experimental Network

HEN is UCL Network Research Group's Heterogeneous Experimental Network, a facility designed to enable network research in a controllable, reconfigurable and reproducible network environment.

HEN consists of a variety of experimental network nodes of varying capability. Each node has multiple networking interfaces, and is network-booted from a central server, allowing the experimenter to quickly change the operating system running on each node. The backbone of HEN consists of a Force 10 E1200 switch, with nearly 500 high-speed network ports. This switch can be soft-configured using VLANs so that the experimenter can build complex network topologies with ease. The switch is non-blocking, so multiple experiments can run on HEN simultaneously.

The goal of HEN is to bridge the gap between simulation and real-work deployment. All too often network research has been confined to simulation, sometimes resulting in an over-simplification of the problem or doubt about the validity of results. The alternative was either very small scale testing using desktop machines, or real-world deployment leading to irreproducible or incomprehensible results. HEN is our attempt to bridge the two: experiments can be large enough to be interesting, but the network environment is still under the researcher's control, leading to a better understanding of what is really going on.

HEN is available for use by all networking researchers at UCL.

Information

HEN Wiki
Start here.

HEN Status
UCL Only

More Photos


Contact

Prof. Mark Handley