Automatic configuration and execution of Internet experiments on an actual node-based testbed

Software simulators are widely used for validation and evaluation of new network technologies and services. Using software simulators is a good way to validate algorithms or observing microbehavior of communication protocols. There are, however, problems with software simulators. Most software simulators require target systems to be described under their own modelling scheme, often using their own modelling language. These descriptions are usually different from what will actually be running as products. It is clear that these products should be validated someway. Time required to run software simulation become problematic also, as we try to simulate realistic target system under realistic environment where nontrivial aggregation of complex network services come into play. We adopt an approach to prepare a configurable testbed using actual nodes. Experiment topologies are created on this testbed virtually without changing physical connections, because the cost of building such experiment environments is very large. Since users of such testbed have to perform many steps to execute the desired experiments on such environment, we design the system that supports the users to execute their experiments. Using our system, all the user have to perform is preparing a experiment configuration file. Our system will execute experiments according to the configuration file. This paper shows the design of our supporting system models, steps of experiment with our system and an example of user's scenario.