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DIANA - 2014
Overall Objectives
Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Bibliography
Overall Objectives
Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Bibliography


Section: New Software and Platforms

NEPI

Participants : Thierry Turletti [correspondant] , Alina Quereilhac, Julien Tribino, Lucia Guevgeozian Odizzio.

NEPI, the Network Experimentation Programming Interface, is a framework to describe and orchestrate network experiments on a variety of network experimentation platforms, including simulators, emulators, live testbeds, and testbed federations. NEPI is capable of supporting arbitrary platforms through the use of a generic network experiment description model, based on abstracting network experiments as a collection of arbitrary resource objects, and through the generalization of the experiment life cycle for all resources. The common resource life cycle consist on the sequence of operations deploy, start, stop, and release. Different resource objects can implement specific versions of those operations to adapt to any platform. NEPI resolves experiment orchestration as an online scheduling problem that consists on executing the deploy, start, stop, and release operations for every resource in the correct order.

During the year 2013 we fully re-implemented NEPI's core libraries to adopt the scheduling-based experiment orchestration approach, improving the flexibility and extensibility of the framework compared to the previous static stage-based orchestration approach. By the end of 2013 the new NEPI framework supported describing and orchestrating experiments on live testbeds, including SSH enables Linux testbed, PlanetLab Internet testbed, and OMF wireless testbed (version 5.4).

In 2014 the framework was extended to support simulation and emulation, using the ns-3 simulator and its direct code execution (DCE) emulation extension. Additionally, automated translation of a same experiment scenario to different platforms, i.e. multi platform experimentation, was incorporated into the framework to provide an unified environment for the development and evaluation of production quality networking software, meant to be deployed on real networks. This unified development and evaluation environment simplifies the transition from a realistic live platform to a controlled emulation platform, and vice-versa, in order to take advantage of the complementary features offered by them. The environment was demonstrated at ACM ICN 2014 for the case of Content Centric Networking (CCNx) development, combining PlanetLab and DCE platforms.

Finally, NEPI now supports OMF experiment control protocol version 6.0, which is the new mainstream release of OMF control framework for testbeds, and SFA (Slice Federation Architecture), for resource discovery and provisioning across federated testbeds. The combination of OMF 6.0 and SFA was adopted as the standard for federated experiment orchestration in the European federation projects OpenLab and Fed4FIRE. NEPI's ability to support federated experiment orchetsration was demonstrated at the OpenLab Final Review. Information about this demo is available at http://nepi.inria.fr/UseCases/VLCCCNStreamingExperiment .

See also the web page http://nepi.inria.fr .

  • Version: 3.2

  • ACM: C.2.2, C.2.4

  • Keywords: networking experimentation, simulation, emulation

  • License: GPL (3)

  • Type of human computer interaction: python library

  • OS/Middelware: Linux

  • Required library or software: python – http://www.python.org

  • Programming language: python