D2.1 - Virtual Laboratory Integration Report

The EMANICS Network of Excellence (NoE) has committed itself to establish a virtual laboratory and a common testbed, which can be used by EMANICS partners for educational and research purposes. In addition, the joint creation and operation of such an infrastructure should foster the integration of the partners and enable joint project work. This first “Virtual Laboratory Integration Report” starts by surveying the lab resources readily available within the NoE and which form the basis of building the virtual lab and common testbeds. Since a joint infrastructure will be easier to plan and more successful if there are concrete usage plans, a number of projects have been defined which will foster the creation of labs and testbeds. The projects are very different in size and nature. The first larger project deals with the construction of a Voice over IP (VoIP) [1,2,3] testbed between EMANICS partners. This testbed will be used for educational purposes, the development of VoIP management tools, to gain experience with VoIP management issues, and to collect VoIP specific traces, which are highly interesting for research in this area. Some of the VoIP infrastructure might also be used internally to simplify the communication between participants. The second larger project aims at collecting traces of network management traffic from real-world production networks and to provide the necessary tools and repositories for the analysis of such traces. This project explores the fact that several partners have access to different types of production networks and thereby it seems feasible to collect a large number of network management traffic traces, which will provide a more complete picture about network management operations in real networks. This project will also explore the question to what extent Grid [4] computing technologies can be used to support a distributed analysis of large traces. Next to these two larger projects, there are two more focused projects to address some concrete needs of some partners. The first one aims at making existing traces available for network replay. Being able to replay the behaviour of a production network will allow researchers to evaluate distributed monitoring algorithms on real-world scenarios. The second focused project has the goal to collect basic resource usage statistics from a large number of different machines in order to evaluate load management algorithms. This report concludes the first phase of this work package in which data was collected, exchanged, and some initial ideas were developed into concrete project plans. This work package is now entering the second phase where the focus shifts to the implementation of the virtual laboratory and common testbeds according to the projects defined in this report