Federation Tools: An Island Connectivity Experiment with Community-Lab

This paper describes the standard or test bed-agnostic interfaces offered by Community-Lab an exemplifies its use in a reference experiment, the Island Connectivity Experiment. The experiment provides a web application that shows a matrix of network measurements across a slice of test bed nodes from different community networks in the test bed. The experiment uses test bed-agnostic and interoperable interfaces such as the Slice-based Facility Architecture (SFA) for resource management, resource description (RSpec), experiment management framework (OMF), instrumentation and measurement collection (OML), and presents a web interface. The experiment uses SFA to selects nodes for a slice, runs the measurements using OMF and collects measurements using OML. The experience in running the experiment validates the implementation of these test bed-agnostic interfaces, shows the complementarity and correct integration among the tools and interfaces as part of the Fed4FIRE federation, and confirms the value of a federation of test beds and the usage of test bed-agnostic tools for experimentation.