NEPI: An integration framework for Network Experimentation

Many different experimentation environments address complementary aspects of network protocol evaluation, but because of their disparities and complexities it is often hard to use them to reproduce the same experiment scenario. NEPI, the Network Experimentation Programming Interface, was created to make evaluation of network protocols and applications easier and more reproducible using different experimentation environments, by providing a uniform object model for designing, deploying, and controlling experiments. In this paper we describe how we enhanced the design of NEPI and provided experiment validation, distributed experiment control, and failure recovery functionalities. We also validate the NEPI approach by implementing support for three complementary environments, a physical testbed, a network emulator, and a network simulator. Furthermore, we show with a concrete experiment use case, available online for reproduction, how easy it is with NEPI to integrate these environments for hybrid-experimentation.