Virtualising Testbeds to Support Large-Scale Reconfigurable Experimental Facilities

Experimentally driven research for wireless sensor networks is invaluable to provide benchmarking and comparison of new ideas. An increasingly common tool in support of this is a testbed composed of real hardware devices which increases the realism of evaluation. However, due to hardware costs the size and heterogeneity of these testbeds is usually limited. In addition, a testbed typically has a relatively static configuration in terms of its network topology and its software support infrastructure, which limits the utility of that testbed to specific casestudies. We propose a novel approach that can be used to (i) interconnect a large number of small testbeds to provide a federated testbed of very large size, (ii) support the interconnection of heterogeneous hardware into a single testbed, and (iii) virtualise the physical testbed topology and thus minimise the need to relocate devices. We present the most important design issues of our approach and evaluate its performance. Our resul...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: EWSN
• Authors: Tobias Baumgartner, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Maick Danckwardt, Christos Koninis, Alexander Kröller, Georgios Mylonas, Dennis Pfisterer, Barry Porter
• Keywords: Computer Networks, EWSN 2010, Federated Testbed, Physical Testbed Topology, Testbed