This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the
scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network
experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a
few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a
generic framework for network experiments that significantly increases
efficiency and ensures reproducibility. To this end, MACI incorporates and
integrates established simulators and analysis tools to foster rapid but
systematic network experiments.
We found MACI indispensable in all phases of the research and development
process of various communication systems, such as i) an extensive DASH video
streaming study, ii) the systematic development and improvement of Multipath
TCP schedulers, and iii) research on a distributed topology graph pattern
matching algorithm. With this work, we make MACI publicly available to the
research community to advance efficient and reproducible network experiments