Experimentation Made Easy

Abstract:

For network studies it is usually necessary to carry out a large series of experiments. On a distributed testbed, researchers have to execute the experiments manually, a labor-intensive and error-prone task, since there is no automation of the overall experimentation process. We introduce the \emph{DES Testbed Management System} (DES-TBMS) for the automation of experimentation in wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks. DES-TBMS consists of several components including a domain specific language to describe and define experiments, a scheduler to manage and control experiments, a distributed monitoring system to gather system data, a visualization tool, and an evaluation tool to compute performance metrics from collected experiment data. Thus, DES-TBMS supports the researcher during the design, execution, and evaluation of experiments.