Automated management of network experiments and user behaviour emulation on large scale testbed facilities

A large number of intelligent components for managing the Future Internet have been proposed recently or are currently being investigated. However, before these network components can be deployed in real-life networks, they need to be thoroughly validated through realistic and large scale experiments. Testbed facilities provide a means to set up large scale network topologies but offer only a limited functionality in managing the deployment of the experiment itself. In this paper, we propose a management framework which automates the configuration and management of network experiments. The framework focuses on the emulation of user behaviour, to obtain realistic network conditions, and features several mechanisms that allow to reduce the experiments' size both temporally (in shorter simulation time) as spatially (with fewer physical nodes).