The primary requirement of the testbed design is that it needs to facilitate the testing of the hypotheses introduced in section 3.1.
There are three major components in the testbed:
Figure 
Figure 5.1: A testbed for comparing load balancing strategies on a
distributed system with n compute servers.
With this testbed, load distribution policies can be tested and compared using the same underlying distributed system and load distribution mechanism. Section 5.2 argues the choice of a trace driven simulation for the distributed system part of the testbed, and chapter 6 describes the actual simulator. Chapter 7 details the load distribution mechanism, and chapter 8 presents the load distribution policies and their algorithms.