Section: New Results

Experimental Evaluation

nepi-ng : an efficient experiment control tool in R2lab

Participants: Thierry Parmentelat, Thierry Turletti, Walid Dabbous, Mohamed Naoufal Mahfoudi.

Experimentation is an essential step for realistic evaluation of wireless network protocols. The evaluation methodology entails controllable environment conditions and a rigorous and efficient experiment control and orchestration for a variety of scenarios. Existing experiment control tools such as OMF often lack in efficiency in terms of resource management and rely on abstractions that hide the details about the wireless setup. We propose nepi-ng , an efficient experiment control tool that leverages job oriented programming model and efficient single-thread execution of parallel programs using asyncio. nepi-ng provides an efficient and modular fine grain synchronization mechanism for networking experiments with light software dependency footprint. This work has been presented at the 12th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & CHaracterization (WINTECH) in November 2018 at New Delhi, India [24].

Using nepi-ng for Mesh Networks Experiments

Participants: Thierry Parmentelat, Thierry Turletti, Mohamed Naoufal Mahfoudi, Walid Dabbous.

We describe a demonstration run on R2lab, an open wireless testbed located in an anechoic chamber at Inria Sophia Antipolis. The demonstration consists in easily deploying a Wi-Fi mesh network. The nodes provisioning, configuration and the scenario orchestration and control are automatically done using the nepi-ng experiment orchestration tool. A performance comparison of two wireless mesh routing protocols in presence of controlled interference is shown. This demo has been presented at the 12th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation & CHaracterization (WINTECH) in November 2018 at New Delhi, India [32].

R2Lab Testbed Evaluation for Wireless Mesh Network Experiments

Participants: Farzaneh Pakzad, Thierry Turletti, Thierry Parmentelat Mohamed Naoufal Mahfoudi, Walid Dabbous.

We have provided critical evaluations of new potential testbeds for the evaluation of SDN-based WMNs. We evaluated the R2Lab wireless testbed platform at Inria Sophia Antipolis, France. This testbed has 37 customisable wireless devices in an anechoic chamber for reproducible research in wireless WiFi and 4G/5G networks. Our work presents the first initial evaluation of the testbed for wireless multi-hop experiments, using traditional WMN routing protocols. Our results demonstrate the potential for SDN experiments. We believe this is an important contribution in its own right, since experimental validation is a key research methodology in this context, and trust in the validity of experimental results is absolutely critical.