MonEx: An Integrated Experiment Monitoring Framework Standing on Off-The-Shelf Components

International audienceMost computer experiments include a phase where metrics are gathered from and about various kinds of resources. This phase is often done via manual, non-reproducible and error-prone steps. Infrastructure monitoring tools facilitate collecting experiments’ data to some extent. However, there is no conventional way for doing so, and there is still much work to be done (e.g. capturing user experiments) to leverage the monitoring activity for monitoring experiments. To overcome those challenges, we define the requirements of experiments monitoring, clarifying Experiment Monitoring Frameworks’ scope and mainly focusing on reusability of experiments’ data, and portability of experiments’ metrics. We then propose MonEx EMF that satisfies those requirements. MonEx is built on top of infrastructure monitoring solutions and supports various monitoring approaches. It fully integrates into the experiment workflow by encompassing all steps from data acquisition to producing publishable figures. Hence, MonEx represents a first step towards unifying methods of collecting experiments’ data

Experimentation on end-to-end performance aware algorithms Cross Mark in the federated environment of the heterogeneous PlanetLab and NITOS testbeds

The constantly increasing diversity of the infrastructure used to deliver Internet services to the end user has created a demand for experimental network facilities featuring heterogeneous resources. Therefore, federation of existing network testbeds has been identified as a key goal in the testbed community, leading to a recent activity burst in this research field. In this paper, we present a federation scheme that was built during the Onelab 2 EU project. This scheme federates the N1TOS wireless testbed with the wired PlanetLab Europe testbed, allowing researchers to access and use heterogeneous experimental facilities under an integrated environment. The usefulness of the resulting federated facility is demonstrated through the testing of an implemented end-to-end delay aware association scheme proposed for wireless mesh networks. We present extensive experiments under both wired congestion and wireless channel contention conditions that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in realistic settings. The experiments are also reproduced in a well-established network simulator and a comparative study between the results obtained in the realistic and simulated environments is presented. Both the architectural building blocks that enable the federation of the testbeds and the execution of the experiment on combined resources, as well as the important insights obtained from the experimental results are described and analyzed, pointing out the importance of integrated experimental facilities for the design and development of the Future Internet. (c) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved