Une approche générique pour l'automatisation des expériences sur les réseaux informatiques

This thesis proposes a generic approach to automate network experiments for scenarios involving any networking technology on any type of network evaluation platform. The proposed approach is based on abstracting the experiment life cycle of the evaluation platforms into generic steps from which a generic experiment model and experimentation primitives are derived. A generic experimentation architecture is proposed, composed of an experiment model, a programmable experiment interface and an orchestration algorithm that can be adapted to network simulators, emulators and testbeds alike. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through the implementation of a framework capable of automating experiments using any combination of these platforms. Three main aspects of the framework are evaluated: its extensibility to support any type of platform, its efficiency to orchestrate experiments and its flexibility to support diverse use cases including education, platform management and experimentation with multiple platforms. The results show that the proposed approach can be used to efficiently automate experimentation on diverse platforms for a wide range of scenarios.Cette thèse propose une approche générique pour automatiser des expériences sur des réseaux quelle que soit la technologie utilisée ou le type de plate-forme d'évaluation. L'approche proposée est basée sur l'abstraction du cycle de vie de l'expérience en étapes génériques à partir desquelles un modèle d'expérience et des primitives d'expérimentation sont dérivés. Une architecture générique d'expérimentation est proposée, composée d'un modèle d'expérience générique, d'une interface pour programmer des expériences et d'un algorithme d'orchestration qui peux être adapté aux simulateurs, émulateurs et bancs d'essai de réseaux. La faisabilité de cette approche est démontrée par la mise en œuvre d'un framework capable d'automatiser des expériences sur toute combinaison de ces plateformes. Trois aspects principaux du framework sont évalués : son extensibilité pour s'adapter à tout type de plate-forme, son efficacité pour orchestrer des expériences et sa flexibilité pour permettre des cas d'utilisation divers, y compris l'enseignement, la gestion des plate-formes et l'expérimentation avec des plates-formes multiples. Les résultats montrent que l'approche proposée peut être utilisée pour automatiser efficacement l'expérimentation sur les plates-formes d'évaluation hétérogènes et pour un éventail de scénarios variés

Managing heterogeneous ns-3 experiments with NEPI

International audienceUsing NEPI to build scenarios where ns-3 simulated networks can be integrated with the PlanetLab network

Demonstrating a unified ICN development and evaluation framework

Demo at ACM ICN conference 2014Information-Centric Networking solutions target world-wide deployment in the Internet. It is hence necessary to dispose of a development and evaluation environment which enables both controllable and realistic experimentation to thoroughly understand how ICN solutions would behave in real life deployment. In this demonstration, we present an ICN development and evaluation framework that combines emulation and live prototyping environments to provide ICN designers and implementers the means to build "beyond- prototype" ICN solutions. We will demonstrate the benefits of such integrated approach by showing how complete experimental studies can be carried out with minimum manual intervention and experiment setup overhead, in both emulation and live environments

Experimentation with large scale ICN multimedia services on the Internet made easy

International audienceIn this paper we present a framework for evaluating ICN solutions in general, and multimedia solutions in particular. This framework simplifies the challenges of conducting large scale experiments on the wild Internet. We leverage on the existing PlanetLab testbed to provide worldwide distributed access to the Internet at minimum cost, and propose the NEPI tool to simplify the design and deployment of experiments. As a means of illustrating the capabilities of the framework, we consider an example experiment in which we evaluate the performance of broadcasting video to over 100 consumers using CCNx against a classical client-server solution

Controllable Packet Prioritization on PlanetLab Using NEPI

Demo Abstract at TridentCom 2012We present the extensions made to NEPI, the Network Experimentation Programming Interface, to allow easy creation and cus-tomization of routing overlays on top of PlanetLab. We particularly focus on demonstrating the traffic shaping capabilities provided by NEPI, with the use of customizable stream filters on PlanetLab overlays to induce controllable packet prioritization. This demonstration is intended to supplement the paper[1] accepted at TRI-DENTCOM'12. We focus on demonstrating the experiment use case presented in that paper, in which we make use of stream filters as a means to control the characteristics of an overlay deployed in PlanetLab, [2] providing a realistic yet controllable environment where to test the POPI[4] tool. NEPI [3] is an experiment management framework which provides support for design, deployment, control and gathering of results of network experiments. We added support for automating deployment and customization of routing overlays on PlanetLab, to alleviate the complexities of performing these tasks manually , and to more easily circumvent administrative limitations. NEPI automates resource discovery, node provisioning, application deployment, and creation of tunnels between the selected nodes to build the overlay network. It also provides the ability to customize traffic in the overlays by adding user defined stream filters , processing functions applied to packets traversing the overlay tunnels. They can be used to implement custom queues, packet filters or transformations, and tunnelling protocols. To demonstrate NEPI's ability to provide a solution to existing problems when using PlanetLab, we selected a previously published experiment case [4]. In this experiment, researchers developed the POPI tool to attempt to infer packet priorities in the intervening routers between two endpoints, by inducing bulk traffic and analyzing point-to-point loss rates. However, in order to verify the results obtained after running POPI on PlanetLab, it was necessary to ask ISPs about their routing policies, because no other means were available to verify that the priorities reported by the tool corresponded to actual prioritization policies

Enabling Iterative Development and Reproducible Evaluation of Network Protocols

International audienceOver the last two decades several efforts have been made to provide adequate experimental environments, aiming to ease the development of new network protocols and applications. These environments range from network simulators providing a highly controllable evaluation conditions, to live testbeds providing realistic evaluation environment. While these different approaches foster network development in different ways, there is no simple way to gradually transit from one to another, or to combine their strengths to suit particular evaluation needs. We believe that enabling a gradual transition from a pure simulated environment to a pure realistic one, where the researcher can decide which aspects of the environment are realistic and which are controllable, allows improving network solutions by simplifying the problem analysis and resolution. In this paper, we propose a new network experimentation framework where simulated and real components can be arbitrarily combined to build custom test environments, allowing refining and improving new protocols and applications implementations by gradually increasing the level of realism of the evaluation environment. Moreover, we present a testbed architecture specifically adapted to support the proposed concept, and discuss the design choices we made based on our previous experience in the area of network testbeds. These choices address key issues in network testbed development, such as ease of experimentation, experiment reproducibility, and testbed federation, to enable scaling the size of experiments beyond what a single testbed would allow

Detailed specifications for first cycle ready

FP7 Fed4Fire project deliverable D5.1This deliverable D5.1 is the first deliverable of WP5, describing the specifications for the first development cycle

Architecture for the heterogeneous federation of future internet experimentation facilities

International audienceInternet systems are currently too complex to be entirely designed in advance and therefore must be thoroughly evaluated in realistic environments. Experimentally driven research is at the heart of Future Internet Research and Experiment (FIRE) facilities, which target various experimenter profiles, ranging from core Internet communities and sensor networks to clouds and web services. Such facilities exist in relative isolation to the detriment of innovative research ideas that could arise from the mixture of their diverse technologies and resources, and their combined power. Internet research communities can benefit from gaining access to a larger number and variety of resources through a federation of these facilities. To this end, we present an architecture to support such a federation of Future Internet experimentation facilities, based on use cases and requirements from infrastructure owners, as well as services and first line support communities

A generic approach to network experiment automation

Cette thèse propose une approche générique pour automatiser des expériences sur des réseaux quelle que soit la technologie utilisée ou le type de plate-forme d'évaluation. L'approche proposée est basée sur l'abstraction du cycle de vie de l'expérience en étapes génériques à partir desquelles un modèle d'expérience et des primitives d'expérimentation sont dérivés. Une architecture générique d'expérimentation est proposée, composée d'un modèle d'expérience générique, d'une interface pour programmer des expériences et d'un algorithme d'orchestration qui peux être adapté aux simulateurs, émulateurs et bancs d'essai de réseaux. La faisabilité de cette approche est démontrée par la mise en œuvre d'un framework capable d'automatiser des expériences sur toute combinaison de ces plateformes. Trois aspects principaux du framework sont évalués : son extensibilité pour s'adapter à tout type de plate-forme, son efficacité pour orchestrer des expériences et sa flexibilité pour permettre des cas d'utilisation divers, y compris l'enseignement, la gestion des plate-formes et l'expérimentation avec des plates-formes multiples. Les résultats montrent que l'approche proposée peut être utilisée pour automatiser efficacement l'expérimentation sur les plates-formes d'évaluation hétérogènes et pour un éventail de scénarios variés.This thesis proposes a generic approach to automate network experiments for scenarios involving any networking technology on any type of network evaluation platform. The proposed approach is based on abstracting the experiment life cycle of the evaluation platforms into generic steps from which a generic experiment model and experimentation primitives are derived. A generic experimentation architecture is proposed, composed of an experiment model, a programmable experiment interface and an orchestration algorithm that can be adapted to network simulators, emulators and testbeds alike. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through the implementation of a framework capable of automating experiments using any combination of these platforms. Three main aspects of the framework are evaluated: its extensibility to support any type of platform, its efficiency to orchestrate experiments and its flexibility to support diverse use cases including education, platform management and experimentation with multiple platforms. The results show that the proposed approach can be used to efficiently automate experimentation on diverse platforms for a wide range of scenarios

A multi-platform event-driven controller for network experiments

International audienceNetwork researchers rely on a wide variety of experimentation platforms, ranging from simulators to emulators and live testbeds, to validate new ideas. Many experiment management frameworks have been created to ease up the complexity and time cost of deploying experiments on different platforms. However, providing flexible deployment capabilities for arbitrary platforms remains a challenging problem. In this work we propose an experiment controller architecture based on event scheduling, designed to enable flexible experiment deployment on diverse platforms. This architecture is capable of handling arbitrary deployment dependencies , both imposed by user requirements and by platform restrictions. It additionally enables flexible resource provi-sioning, at any point in time during experiment execution, and flexible experiment monitoring events