Tutorial, 18 May, 14:00 - 17:30
Title: OMF - From a Local to a Global and Educational Perspective
Instructors: Instructors: Guillaume Jourjon, Thierry Rakotoarivelo, and Max Ott
Length of the tutorial: Half day (3 hours)
Intended audience: Introductory to Intermediate
Background knowledge or skills required: none
Introduction
Experimental platforms (or testbeds) are instrumental for the evaluation of new network technologies. In many cases, these testbeds are solely built and used for a specific research project, and are often not maintained, re-used, or shared. This wasteful approach also limits the independent verification of experimental results by the community. This is a cornerstone of the scientific method, which is further hampered by the lack of unambiguous way to describe an experiment and enable others to repeat it.
The cOntrol and Management Framework (OMF) [3] is a suite of management, control, and measurement services & tools for networking testbeds. From a management perspective, OMF provides several software services to access, allocate and manage heterogeneous resources within a testbed.
In this tutorial, we will cover the general use-case scenario of OMF where researchers need to orchestrate and run their experiment on one testbed. Then, we will show how OMF can be extended to provide an e-learning experience and cross testbed experimentations.
Objectives and Outline
The first objective of this tutorial is to familiarize participants with OMF software suite. Thus, we present detailed examples on how to run experiments on a wireless testbed using different scenarios. These scenarios are ranging from a simple “helloworld” experiment to the extension of Iperf [1] traffic generator to support live measurements. Attendees will learn, how to:
- write modular experiment descriptions using OEDL, the OMF Experiment Description Language;
- instrument their own applications;
- retrieve measurements and analyse them.
In the second part of this tutorial, we present how OMF can be used in an educational perspective and therefore facilitates the shift from basic CS courses to research in networking. We have recently upgraded a e-learning platform called IREEL [2] to integrate OMF. More precisely, we show how to use this new platform to develop online courses and assignments. In order to do that, we will use experiment descriptions from the first half of the tutorial to create configurable web page that represents an OMF script. Then, we will show how to use this tool in the context of an introductory course to networking. Finally, we will demonstrate the benefit of OMF as a generic management framework using the same experiment description on different testbeds around the world.
Relevance
This tutorial is relevant to Tridentcom’s attendees interested in the use of OMF on either one of the numerous OMF-enable testbed or on their personal testbed. It will also provide a new vision for CS course with the integration of state of the art research tool whilst keeping a sufficient high level interface to allow students with little programming skills to follow these courses.
References
1. NLANR/DAST : Iperf - the TCP/UDP bandwidth measurement tool. http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/.
2. L. Dairaine, G. Jourjon, E. Lochin, and S. Ardon. IREEL: Remote Experimentation with Real Protocols and Applications over Emulated Network. Inroads, the SIGCSE Bulletin, 39(2):92–96, June 2007.
3. T. Rakotoarivelo, M. Ott, I. Seskar, and G. Jourjon. OMF: a control and management framework for networking testbeds. In SOSP Workshop on Real Overlays and Distributed Systems (ROADS ’09), page 6, Big Sky, USA, Oct. 2009.
Instructors CVs
Guillaume Jourjon is researcher at NICTA. He received his PhD from the University of New South Wales and the Toulouse University of Science in 2008. Prior to his PhD, he received a Engineer Degree from the ENSICA, a French aeronautical engineering school in Toulouse and a Master of Research in telecommunications and networking. He also received a DEUG in Physics and Chemistry (Major) and Mathematic (Minor) from the University of Toulouse III.
Thierry Rakotoarivelo is a researcher at NICTA. His current research focuses on the design, control, and management of networking testbeds; peer-topeer systems; and overlay networks. He received his Ph.D. (2007) in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales (Australia) in cotutelle with the Institut National Polytechnique of Toulouse (France), and his masters degree (2001) in Computer Networks from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees of Toulouse, (France). From 2001 to 2003, he was a research engineer with the Motorola Australia Research Center (MARC, now closed), developing Quality of Service technologies for mission critical wireless networks.
Max Ott is the Research Group Leader of the Networked Systems Theme at NICTA since January 2006. His group is active in various international testbed activities, such as FIRE in Europe and GENI in the US. Before joining NICTA he co-founded Semandex, which is a pioneer provider of Content-Based Networks, a new generation of Enterprise Information Integration and Knowledge Management systems. He is also holding a Research Professor appointment at WINLAB, Rutgers University, where he is responsible for the software architecture of the ORBIT testbed. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Tokyo University, Japan, and an M.S. from the Technical University, Vienna, Austria.