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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.
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