Integration of OMF-Based Testbeds in a Global-Scale Networking Facility

Abstract

PlanetLab is a global scale platform for experimentation of new networking applications in a real environment. It consists of several nodes, offered by academic institutions or companies spread all over the world, that can be shared by the networking community for its tests. The main drawback of PlanetLab is its scarce heterogeneity in terms of the access technologies it offers. In this paper we discuss the efforts we made in order to alleviate this problem. We first developed a tool that allowed us to integrate a WiFi testbed controllable by OMF (Orbit Management Framework) [16] in PlanetLab by means of a multi-homed PlanetLab node. OMF is a set of tools that make it easy to automatically execute experiments and collect measurements on a WiFi testbed. The tool we developed allows, more generally, to solve the issues that arises with multi-homed PlanetLab nodes (i.e. PlanetLab nodes having more than a network interface). In order to be able to fully exploit the potential of such PlanetLab nodes, there is the need for the users to add routing rules (e.g. rules to reach a destination through the WiFi interface, instead of the Ethernet interface). Such operation cannot be performed in a PlanetLab environment, as the rules a user adds would also affect other users’ traffic. Therefore it arises the necessity of user-specific routing tables, i.e. routing tables whose rules are only valid for traffic belonging to that user. In this way the user is able to route his traffic through the WiFi interface, and make it traverse the OMF-controllable WiFi testbed, while other users’ traffic continues to get routed through the default primary interface. We also had to support the integration of the OMF facilities (e.g. the OMF controller) into the user environment, which is called slice, in order to allow for the customization of the testbed (e.g. loading a specific disk image on each node) and the automatical execution of experiments. The software we developed to achieve such integration is in the process of being integrated in the code base of PlanetLab, so that anyone is able to integrate its wireless infrastructure in PlanetLab.