Experiment title:
Experimenting with an Open API for Quagga and Cross-layer Coordinated Networks

Experimenter(s):
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain
Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Germany

TEFIS testbeds involved:
PlanetLab, Kyatera

Short description about the experiment and the application/solution being developed/tested:
The Open and Programmable ENvironment for Experimenting with Routing (OPENER) is a OpenAPI interface to the legacy Quagga routing suite based on RESTful webservices. OPENER provides a robust and extensible management interface that complements and enhances the functionalities present in the legacy Quagga routing suite. To evaluate the OPENER we propose two complementary experiments: 1) Quagga OpenAPI Scalability, where we will compare approaches with centralized and distributed node management. 2) IP offloading performance assessment in centralized node management

Problems to be solved/what to be tested:
The goal of the first experiment is to assess the scalability of a deployment of the OPENER framework using a large number of PlaneLab nodes. The second experiment is focused on a use of the OPENER framework, working in coordination with an external network management application.

Testbeds involved in the experiment and what kind of support do they provide for the experiment:
The PlanetLab testbed provides us a large number of nodes to deploy the Quagga routing suite with our interface in order to evaluate its resource requirements and scalability. The Kyatera testbed is necessary to extend the experiment to the networking layers below IP in order to allow for testing of multi-layer coordination (i.e., IP Offloading) with an external network management application.

Planned workflow for the experiment:
The first experiment focuses on the evaluation of the scalability of the OpenAPI implementation. To this end, the experiment is composed of 32 different rounds, where we will vary the number of managed nodes by 5, 10, 50 and 100 within the PlanetLAB network, along with the number of clients accessing the service (50, 100, 500 and 1000). Both cases will be tested with a distributed and a centralized deployment of the applications. For the second experiment instead of reserving a big amount of PlanetLAB nodes, we will focus on the evaluation of the OPENER itself and to emphasize TEFIS inter-testbed orchestration. In particular, this second experiment will use the same software packages compiled in the first experiment, plus a cross-layer implemetation of IP offloading between PlanetLAB and Kyatera.

Expected benefits from TEFIS:
We expect TEFIS to provide us the basic functionalities required by the experiments:
- Node selection and insertion to a particular network slice.
- Retrieve information such as IP address (or DNS name) of the selected nodes for the test.
- Copy files to the remote nodes, e.g., configuration files, traces, etc.
- Send commands to all the nodes with customizable parameters
- Receive feedback about the status of a command and its standard output and error.

Contacts to know more:
René Serral: rserral@ac.upc.edu
Marcel Caria: caria@ida.ing.tu-bs.de

References:
The Quagga routing suite: http://www.quagga.net/