GPLMT: A Lightweight Experimentation and Testbed Management Framework

Abstract

Conducting experiments in federated, distributed, and heterogeneous testbeds is a challenging task for researchers. Researchers have to take care of the whole experiment life cycle, ensure the reproducibility of each run, and the comparability of the results. We present GPLMT, a flexible and lightweight framework for managing testbeds and the experiment life cycle. GPLMT provides an intuitive way to formalize experiments. The resulting experiment description is portable across varying experimentation platforms. GPLMT enables researchers to manage and control networked testbeds and resources, and conduct experiments on large-scale, heterogeneous, and distributed testbeds. We state the requirements and the design of GPLMT, describe the challenges of developing and using such a tool, and present selected user studies along with their experience of using GPLMT in varying scenarios. GPLMT is free and open source software and can be obtained from the project’s GitHub repository.