Methodology definition for reliable network experimentation

Abstract

©2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As researchers in the networking area keep adopting experimental network testing as a valid mechanism to develop, validate, and improve their research, it becomes more apparent that an overall framework supporting and assisting during the experimentation process is necessary. Particularly, this assistance is relevant in processes such as experiment preparation, or results validation. As a consequence, the goal, and thus the contribution, of this paper is twofold, on the one hand we propose a novel set of guidelines which establish the set of requirements any testbed for network experimentation should follow. On the other hand, as the other relevant contribution of this work, we propose a mechanism for generating meta-data information on the experiments that ease the publication of the obtained datasets. Finally, as a usecase, we present a particular implementation of this framework which we deploy in a real scenario to prove the capabilities of the proposed testing procedure.This work was partially funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TEC2009-07041, and the Catalan Government under contract 2009 SGR1508.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft