The 3GPP System Architecture Evolution (SAE) is a very attractive environment from the service provisioning perspective, thanks to the variety of access technologies and mobility features introduced. In such a diverse environment, experimentation infrastructures (i.e., testbeds) become a key instrument for telecom operators, since mobility solutions and service behavior in their presence need to be validated under the different possible configurations from early development stages. However, the complexity of 3GPP SAE scenarios hinders conventional testbeds from adhering to cost-effectiveness and business-oriented criteria, due to the high infrastructure and operational costs involved. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes an experimentation infrastructure that, based on combining virtualization techniques with several of the available open source IMS and mobility toolkits, allows the easy creation and deployment of complex 3GPP SAE network emulation scenarios whi...