MultiNext — Measuring concurrent multipath transmissions in an experimental facility

A major feature of the Future Internet is the federation of resources, e.g. for forming application-specific routing slices. Currently this can be done by using overlay technologies. Network virtualization techniques, as investigated in the VINI project, further advances this concept to allow the combination of partial resources on network nodes and links. While we do not yet have standard solutions for the general Internet, federation concepts are currently tested across testbeds in Europe, USA and Asia in order to combine testbed resources for experiments like FIRE and GENI. As network scientists we need such testbeds in order to validate theoretical results for large-scale highly distributed environments and under real network conditions. But since testbeds nowadays are typically customized to particular user groups and offer different capabilities some experiments require the federation of testbeds to profit from a broader set of characteristics and functions. We here present the Project MultiNext that aims at validating a buffer model for concurrent multipath transmissions. For that we conducted experiments over multiple federated testbeds. Since there was not a single testbed that could offer all the capabilities we needed, we combined capabilities from different experimental facilities (G-Lab, PlanetLab Europe, and VINI). While a measurement instrumentation of testbeds is essential to support operation, federation and experimenters, we additionally had particular demands for high precision measurements in our experiment. Therefore the contribution of the MultiNext project is threefold: a) detailing the conducted experiments (setup, results, findings) b) providing our experience with the usability of federated testbeds and c) illustrating the use of advanced measurement technologies in experimental facilities.