Virtualising testbeds to support large-scale reconfigurable experimental facilities

  • Authors:

  • Tobias Baumgartner;Ioannis Chatzigiannakis;Maick Danckwardt;Christos Koninis;Alexander Kröller;Georgios Mylonas;Dennis Pfisterer;Barry Porter

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Computer Science, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany;Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece;Institute of Telematics, University of Lübeck, Germany;Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece;Dept. of Computer Science, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany;Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece;Institute of Telematics, University of Lübeck, Germany;Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK

  • Venue:
  • EWSN'10 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

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 case-studies. 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 results indicate that testbed virtualisation can be achieved with high efficiency and without hindering the realism of experiments.