ClickWatch — An experimentation framework for communication network test-beds

It is hard to experiment with test-beds for communication networks: data produced in the network has to be retrieved and analyzed, networks must be reconfigured before and between experiments, data is often little structured (log-files) and analysis methods and tools are generic. Even though many problems of experimentation are the same for all experiments, re-use is sparse and even simple experiments require large efforts. We present a framework that attempts to solve these problems: we define a set of requirements for experimenting with network test-beds, we describe the principles and inner workings of our framework, demonstrate it with a typical example experiment, and present measurement results that illustrate the feasibility and scalability of our approach. Some qualitative and quantitative aspects of ClickWatch are compared to the commonly used logfile based approach to experimentation.