Heterogeneous Networking Testbeds Integration and Wireless Network Virtualization

OF THE THESIS Heterogeneous Networking Testbeds Integration and Wireless Network Virtualization by Rajesh Mahindra Thesis Director: Professor D. Raychaudhuri Networking research has grown immensely over the past few years. This has urged the need for a heterogeneous networking research infrastructure, to experiment with the interaction and integration of different types of networks. This requirement led to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) effort, supported by NSF, which aims at creating a global infrastructure for conducting networking experiments across diverse substrates such as wired, wireless, sensor and cellular networks. In this work, we discuss challenges involved in federating two diverse testbeds PlanetLab and ORBIT and present a model for building a united infrastructure for the models. PlanetLab is a global research wired network that supports the development of new network services. ORBIT is a laboratory-based wireless network emulator for 802.11 testing. An integrated wired-wireless testbed will increase the scalability of experimentation. Proof-of-concept experiments are also presented reinforcing the usefulness of the model in terms of facilitating experiments over the integrated infrastructure. Such an integrated infrastructure poses a requirement of support for wireless network virtualization supporting multiple concurrent wireless experiments. Unlike wired networks, wireless networks present unique challenges making the task of wireless virtualization a difficult problem. The critical problem of simultaneous experimentation