Title :
CrowdLab: An architecture for volunteer mobile testbeds
Author :
Cuervo, Eduardo ; Gilbert, Peter ; Wu, Bi ; Cox, Landon P.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Duke Univ., Durham, NC, USA
Abstract :
Researchers investigating mobile and wireless systems can run experiments on many testbeds, but no existing option supports experimentation “in the wild“ without sacrificing features such as access to low-level wireless state and efficient scheduling of co-local guests. To fill this void, we present a new architecture for mobile testbeds called CrowdLab. CrowdLab allows researchers to run guest virtual machines on volunteer mobile nodes and ensures efficient use of testbed resources through a new dual-mode networking abstraction and a weakly-consistent, replicated state store called a site directory. We have implemented two CrowdLab prototypes, one for x86 laptops and one for ARM-based Nokia N810 Internet Tablets, and evaluated them using power measurements, micro-benchmarks, and trace-driven emulation. Our evaluation demonstrates that handheld users can contribute 2.5 hours per day to CrowdLab and still have over 12.5 hours of idle time remaining. In addition, emulated mobility-trace replays show that CrowdLab´s fault-tolerance mechanisms allow experiments to run uninterrupted, even in the face of high churn rates.
Keywords :
Internet; computer networks; fault tolerance; mobile computing; virtual machines; ARM-based Nokia N810 Internet tablets; CrowdLab prototype; colocal guest scheduling; dual-mode networking abstraction; fault tolerance mechanism; low-level wireless state; microbenchmark; mobile nodes; power measurement; testbed resources; time 2.5 hr; trace-driven emulation; virtual machine; volunteer mobile testbed; wireless system; x86 laptops; Communication system security; Hardware; IP networks; Mobile communication; Virtual machine monitors; Virtual machining; Wireless communication;
Conference_Titel :
Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), 2011 Third International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Bangalore
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-8952-7
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4244-8951-0
DOI :
10.1109/COMSNETS.2011.5716419