Testbed innovations for experimenting with wired and wireless software defined networks

Abstract

Widely available and remotely accessible test beds have been used for a direct comparison of innovative protocols and ideas with existing technologies. Therefore, multiple test beds have been established, aiming at providing experimentation services with both wireless and wired networks. In this context, several frameworks have been developed that enable easy experimentation with the heterogeneous resources that the test beds provide. However, most of these test beds aim only in wireless/wired networking experimentation, resulting in unsimilar testbed control and experimentation tools. Several attempts have been made towards bridging this gap in order to allow experimentation with heterogeneous wired and wireless resources. In this article, we present our contributions in extending the state-of-the-art control and management framework for wireless test beds with support for Software Defined Networking resources. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate two use cases that take advantage of our extensions using novel architectures and present our findings. © 2015 IEEE.