A new class of geographically distributed network services is emerging, and the most effective way to design, evaluate, and deploy these services is by using an overlay-based testbed. Unlike conventional network testbeds, however, we advocate an approach that supports both researchers that want to develop new services, and clients that want to use them. This dual use, in turn, suggests four design principles that are not widely supported in existing testbeds: services should be able to run continuously and access a slice of the overlay's resources, control over resources should be distributed, overlay management services should be unbundled and run in their own slices, and APIs should be designed to promote application development. This talk describes this high-level vision, and reports the status and plan for the realization of the vision in PlanetLab.

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Larry Peterson is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Princeton University. He recently helped launch the PlanetLab project while on sabbatical at Intel Research, and is now serving as Director of the Princeton-hosted PlanetLab Consortium. His research focuses network systems, and he is a co-author of the textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach".

Professor Peterson recently stepped down as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, and he has served on the editorial boards for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, and the ACM Transactions on Embedded Systems. He was co-chair of the inaugural HotNets workshop and program chair for the 19th SOSP. Peterson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1985.