A management framework for automating network experiments and user behaviour emulation on large scale testbed facilities

Generic test environments such as Emu lab allow to perform large scale tests on different network topologies. While these facilities offer a tool to easily configure the topology, setting up realistic network scenarios afterwards is a manual and time consuming task involving the configuration of dozens of servers, including the installation of software suites and the emulation of subscriber behaviour. Also collecting the evaluation results afterwards can be complex and time consuming. This article discusses a management framework that allows both automating the configuration of networking experiments through a Graphical User Interface and automating the collection of measurements and visualisation of experimental results afterwards

Design of an emulation framework for evaluating large-scale open content aware networks

The popularity of multimedia services has resulted in new revenue opportunities for network and service providers but has also introduced important new challenges. The large amount of resources and stringent quality requirements imposed by multimedia services has triggered the need for open content aware networks, where specific management algorithms that optimize the delivery of multimedia services can be dynamically plugged in when required. In the past, a plethora of algorithms have been proposed ranging from specific cache algorithms to video client heuristics that are optimized for a specific multimedia service type and its corresponding delivery. However, it remains difficult to accurately characterize the performance of these algorithms and investigate the impact of an actual deployment in multimedia services. In this paper, we present a framework that allows evaluating the performance of such algorithms for open content aware networks. The proposed evaluation framework has two important advantages. First, it performs an emulation of the novel algorithms instead of using a simulation approach, which is often carried out to characterize performance. Second, the emulation framework allows evaluating the impact of combining different multimedia algorithms with each other. We present the architecture of the emulation framework and discuss the main software components used. Furthermore, we present a performance evaluation of an illustrative use case, which identifies the need for emulation-based evaluation