Wipi: A Low-Cost Large-Scale Remotely-Accessible Network Testbed

The high cost of establishing a network experimental lab obstructs researchers from fulfilling and validating their research proposal. Remotely accessible testbeds overcome this difficulty by allowing researchers to access the testbed and the attached expensive wireless devices through the Internet. In this paper, we introduce WiPi as a low-cost networking testbed that can be utilized remotely and supports large-scale experiments. WiPi is implemented from the available off-the-shelf computing nodes, such as standard laptops and Raspberry Pis, with the goal to be affordable to many institutions, especially in developing countries. Multiple features, including users' isolation, disk protection, ease of user experience, power efficiency, multiple application domains, efficient disk utilization, and resource pooling, are implemented as part of the testbed. The interface and functionality of WiPi target three different levels of researchers in terms of their research experience: Expert, users with no prior knowledge with ns3, and novice. Besides, WiPi can combine simulation, emulation, and experimentation over real devices in the same experiment to further support larger-scale experiments. The web interface of the testbed allows researchers to partition and map a virtual network with a large number of virtual nodes to a physical network with a limited number of real nodes. Evaluation results show that WiPi can be utilized by a wide range of researches and can support different networking applications. Furthermore, it can reduce the execution time of large-scale experiments by almost 40%, highlighting its suitability as a low-cost, large-scale remotely-accessible network testbed.