The EXPRESS SDN experiment in the OpenLab large scale shared experimental Facility

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of an experiments dealing with SDN for Wireless Mesh Networks over the OpenLab Facility. The experiment is called EXPRESS: “EXPerimenting and Researching Evolutions of Software-defined networking over federated test-bedS”. EXPRESS aims at designing and evaluating a resilient SDN system able to operate in fragmented and intermittently connected networks as needed in a Wireless Mesh Networking environment. The experimental dimension of EXPRESS is to deploy the designed SDN infrastructure over a federation of three testbeds (PlanetLab, NITOS and w-iLab.t) from the OpenLab federation. The experiments consist in the evaluation of a designed solution for the selection of the SDN controller by the Wireless Mesh Routers in intermittently connected networks. The experiment is executed through the OMF framework (cOntrol and Management Framework). OMF provides the ability to describe the distributed experiment spanning over different physical testbeds. Following the experiment description, the OMF framework realizes the configuration of the resources (in our case the Wireless Mesh Routers) and their interconnection, runs the experiment and collects the results.