FabFed: Tool-Based Network Federation for Testbed of Testbeds - Paradigm and Practice

Approaching the end of the FABRIC project construction phase, many experimenters expressed a need for integrating heterogeneous types of resources from external testbed and cloud providers. This prompted research in cross-testbed federation paradigms, practically in pursuit of the vision of “testbed of testbeds”. With past experience and lessons learned, we propose to adopt a “tool-based federation paradigm” with the hypothesis that a tool-based federation approach is viable and performant for automating large, complex cross-testbed experiments. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and solutions in developing the FABRIC Federation Extension (FabFed), a software framework that implements the tool-based federation approach and enables FABRIC users to run large experiments across multiple testbed and cloud providers. We validate our approach through extensive use of FabFed to build complex experiments across both the FABRIC and partner testbeds. We also share our observations and draw insights about the usability and performance characteristics of our approach through real-world operations and experimental quantitative analysis.