Designing and orchestrating reproducible experiments on federated networking testbeds

In addition to theoretical analysis and simulations, the evaluation of new networking technologies in a real-life context and scale is critical to their global adoption and deployment. Federations of experimental platforms (aka testbeds) offer a controlled and cost-effective solution to perform such an evaluation. Most recent efforts in that area focused on building those facilities and providing experimenters with tools to allow the discovery and provisioning of their shared resources. Many challenges remain in order to support the complete experiment life cycle in a federated environment.We propose OMF-F, a framework which allows the definition of networking experiments and their execution over shared resources provided by different federated administrative domains. OMF-F provides a domain-specific language enabling rich event-based experiment descriptions. It defines a specific resource model and protocol, which together with its publish-subscribe messaging system allows automatic experiment orchestrations at a large scale. OMF-F further provides interfaces to operate with existing resource discovery and provisioning tools for federated testbeds.Our contributions in this paper are threefold. First we provide detailed descriptions of OMF-F’s design, its architecture, and its involved entities. Then, we present a quantitative evaluation of its underlying messaging and event-handling systems. Finally, we discuss two real examples of OMF-F deployed and used on federated domains to define and execute experiments.