My name is Roman Chertov and I am a sixth year Computer Science student at Purdue University. I am currently doing my PhD. under Dr. Sonia Fahmy. My current research interests involve a detailed comparison between emulated testbeds and network simulators. Emulated testbeds like EMULAB provide physical machines that can be configured into a variety of topologies. This allows one to create experiments that are as close to reality as possible, as physical machines and real world software are used. The obvious drawback is scalability and difficulty in managing the actual machines. Simulators like ns-2 are easy to use, but use abstracted models of the systems, thus sometimes leaving out crucial details. Since the devil is in the details, the outcome of the same experiment on the testbed can be entirely different from the simulator. I am interested in identifying the crucial details with emphasis on Security experiments so that higher fidelity models for the simulators could be built.

The setup includes:
Dell Precision 690 2 Quad 1.8Ghz Xeon CPU workstation with 6 Intel Pro cards
Cisco 2600
Cisco 2691
Cisco 3620
Cisco 3640
Cisco 3660
Cisco 7200
Cisco 7206VXR
Juniper M7i (on loan from ISI)
Cisco 12000GSR (at WAIL)
(The testbed is maintained by Purdue School of Technology and Purdue ECE department)