Section: Research Program

Experimentation

Of paramount importance in our target research context is experimental validation using testbeds, simulators and emulators. In addition to using various existing experimentation methodologies, Resist contributes in advancing the state of the art in experimentation methods and experimental research practices, particularly focusing on elasticity and resilience.

We develop and deploy testbeds and emulators for experimentation with new networking paradigms such as SDN and NFV, to enable large-scale in-vitro experiments combining all aspects of Software-Defined Infrastructures (server virtualization, SDN/NFV, storage). Such fully controlled environments are particularly suitable for our experiments on resilience, as they ease the management of fault injection features.

We are playing a central role in the development of the Grid'5000 testbed  [34] and our objective is to reinforce our collaborations with other testbeds, towards a testbed federation in order to enable experiments to scale to multiple testbeds, providing a diverse environment reflecting the Internet itself.

Moreover, our research focuses on extending the infrastructure virtualization capabilities of our Distem  [37] emulator, which provides a flexible software-based experimental environment.

Finally, methodological aspects are also important for ensuring trustworthy and reproducible experiments, and raises many challenges regarding testbed design, experiment description and orchestration, along with automated or assisted provenance data collection  [35].