Experimenting with P2P traffic optimization for wireless mesh networks in a federated OMF-PlanetLab environment

The ultimate success of the Wireless Mesh Network paradigm (WMN) in large scale deployments depends on the ability to test it in real world scenarios. A typical application scenario which is worth to be investigated in such a context is peer-to-peer traffic management. The creation of large scale testbeds for evaluating wireless mesh technologies and protocols, and for testing their ability to support real world applications in realistic environments, is then a crucial step. OMF (cOntrol and Management Framework) is a well-established control, measurement, and management framework for wireless testbeds. In this paper we present how we integrated an OMF-based wireless testbed in the planetary-scale PlanetLab testbed, making it possible for PlanetLab users to run experiments spanning on both PlanetLab and an OMF-based wireless testbed. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of such an integrated scenario, we tested on it an innovative peer-to-peer traffic optimization technique for the BitTorrent file sharing application. The possibility of running this kind of experiments highlighted several real-world issues which could be investigated thanks to our hybrid experimental scenario.