A Management Framework for Automating Network Experiments and User Behaviour Emulation on Large Scale Testbed Facilities

Generic test environments such as Emulab allow to perform large scale tests on different network topologies. While these facilities offer a tool to easily configure the topology, setting up realistic network scenarios afterwards is a manual and time consuming task involving the configuration of dozens of servers, including the installation of software suites and the emulation of subscriber behaviour. Also collecting the evaluation results afterwards can be complex and time consuming. This article discusses a management framework that allows both automating the configuration of networking experiments through a Graphical User Interface and automating the collection of measurements and visualisation of experimental results afterwards.