This week at SIGCOMM 2010, members of the OneLab team at Fraunhofer FOKUS demonstrated Multi-hop Packet Tracking, a distributed solution for network supervision in future networks.
Figure: Packet Tracking overview
In the live demonstration the experts showed the use of Multi-hop Packet Tracking in a global federated testbed. For this they used network nodes of various testbeds, including PlanetLab, German Future Internet testbed G-Lab, and the VINI testbed in the USA.
SIGCOMM is one of the most important international annual gatherings in the network research field, and took place from August 30 to September 3 in New Delhi, India.
Further details: Demonstration description Poster Flyer
We are pleased to announce the release of OMF version 5.3, developed by the OMF/OML development team, which includes researchers from OneLab partner NICTA.
OMF is a framework for controlling, instrumenting, and managing resources from experimental networking platforms (testbeds). Researchers use OMF to describe, instrument, execute, and analyse their experiments, while testbed owners use OMF to make the resources in the testbed discoverable, to control access to them, to optimize their utilization through virtualization, and to federate with other testbeds.
OMF version 5.3 includes many new features, such as a new event driven mechanism, support for disconnected experiments, and support for experiments on PlanetLab. In addition, several bugs were fixed (described in the ticket-tracking system), and some major code refactoring was carried out, which will facilitate future OMF extensions and support federation and virtualization (e.g. all OMF communications are now using the Publish/Subscribe scheme, new naming scheme for resources, etc.).
Further details about this release can be found on the OMF website, including installation instructions, source code, and a detailed user documentation guide.
Three key OneLab researchers have written a chapter about the OneLab initiative that has been published in a leading book series on new network architectures. The chapter, entitled "OneLab: An Open Federated Facility for Experimentally Driven Future Internet Research", appears in Volume 297 of Studies in Computational Intellegence, published by Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. The authors are Serge Fdida and Timur Friedman of UPMC, and Thierry Parmentelat of INRIA. Full details of the publication can be found on the Springerlink website.
Chapter abstract: Several initiatives worldwide are seeking to build an open, generalpurpose, and sustainable large-scale shared experimental facility to foster the emergence of the Future Internet. This objective is ambitious as it calls for the setting up of testbeds to study solutions yet to be designed. Furthermore, any proposed new architecture must be accompanied by a transition scenario to overcome the significant obstacles that will lie in the path to its eventual adoption. The OneLab experimental facility is a leading prototype for a flexible federation of testbeds that is open to the current Internet. OneLab has pioneered the concept of testbed federation, providing a federation model that has been proven through a durable interconnection between its flagship testbed PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and the global PlanetLab infrastructure, mutualising over five hundred sites around the world. OneLab is further developing an understanding of what it means for autonomous organizations operating heterogeneous testbeds to federate their computation, storage, and network resources, including defining terminology, establishing universal design principles, and identifying candidate federation strategies
The services offered to users of OneLab testbeds are to be extended with SAC networks. SAC (Situated and Autonomic Communication) is a new communication model that encompasses technologies such as mobile ad-hoc communications, Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), and Opportunistic Networks. Within OneLab, researchers have designed a PlanetLab/SAC gateway that allows for interconnection between OneLab testbeds and future networking technologies such as opportunistic networks (for example Pocket-Switched Networks (PSNs) of the EU Haggle project), DTNs (such as in the Internet Research Task Force's Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, DNTRG), and future autonomic networks (EU ANA project). These technologies are specifically designed to run on mobile wireless devices communicating over ad hoc wireless links (Bluetooth, WiFi ad hoc) forming wireless mobile clouds.
Figure: Network-agnostic content-centric routing between remote Haggle and DTN clouds over the OneLab/PlanetLab overlay.
A demonstration given at FIREweek 2010 by OneLab researchers Pierre Imai (University of Basel) and Franck Legendre (ETH Zurich) illustrated a use case of content-centric communications between two remote Haggle and DTN clouds over the PlanetLab overlay. This use case is motivated by the data-centric nature of the Haggle networking stack and the support of the publish/subscribe paradigm in the DTNRG networking stack.
On the Haggle side, PhotoShare (an application developed at Uppsala University in Sweden) relies on the Haggle stack to distribute pictures across opportunistic networks. It allows a user with a mobile phone to easily share pictures taken with their phone's camera. When taking a picture, the user can annotate it with any number of tags (e.g., flower, sunflower, etc.) that will be added to the picture's metadata. The picture is then published on the Haggle network as Haggle content and users that have interests matching the metadata will receive it. The more interests that match a picture's metadata, the higher the likelihood that the user will receive the picture.
On the DTN side, an RSS feed subscriber based on the DTN publish/subscribe API, developed by OneLab researcher Yoann Lopez (Thales Communication) allows users to subscribe to feeds with any given set of keywords (or tags).
In between, both SAC gateways abstract the specific stack API communication calls to a meta-communication API, which allows our PlanetLab/SAC Gateway (labelled "G1" in the figure) to advertise this Haggle publication to other SAC clouds, including the DTNRG cloud in a network-agnostic fashion. In this latter cloud, a node can subscribe to content feeds based on keywords. The DTN2 gateway ("G3" in the figure) would answer positively to a DTN node requesting content with keywords such as "flower" or "sunflower". G3 will retrieve the content from G1 (and G1 from the mobile device) whenever a node in its cloud is requesting such content.
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In several research scenarios the geographic location of the measurement nodes plays a significant role. Such information is provided by the site information collection at PlanetLab Central. However, in this collection a relatively large number of the PlanetLab nodes are mislocated, with a varying magnitude of error.
In order to enable more accurate results in this kind of experiment, the Onelab research team at OneLab innovation partners ELTE, led by Prof. Gábor Vattay, has developed a web-based calibration tool to gather reliable information on the location of PlanetLab Europe sites. With the help of the PlanetLab Europe support team at UPMC, all site administrators were asked to correct the geographic position of their PlanetLab nodes.
As Figure 1 shows almost three quarters of the nodes were corrected, and the location of a further 15% of the nodes were approved, making 90% of PlanetLab node locations in Europe correct.
Figure 2 shows the probability distribution of error in node location. It can be seen that the distribution of error has a very long tail: some nodes had a larger error than the largest distance within Europe! Even though this might seem unreasonable, this was really the case, since some of the nodes were registered to the longitude and latitude coordinates of (0.0) and (1.1).
Thanks to the calibration tool developed at ELTE and the overwhelmingly positive response from site administrators the error in the geolocation coordinates of PlanetLab Europe nodes has been reduced by several orders of magnitude. This development will allow researchers to conduct much more precise geographic experiments on the PlanetLab Europe infrastructure.
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Three key OneLab researchers have written a chapter about the OneLab initiative that has been published in a leading book series on new network architectures. The chapter, entitled "OneLab: An Open Federated Facility for Experimentally Driven Future Internet Research", appears in Volume 297 of Studies in Computational Intellegence, published by Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. The authors are Serge Fdida and Timur Friedman of 
In several research scenarios the geographic location of the measurement nodes plays a significant role. Such information is provided by the site information collection at 
Figure 2 shows the probability distribution of error in node location. It can be seen that the distribution of error has a very long tail: some nodes had a larger error than the largest distance within Europe! Even though this might seem unreasonable, this was really the case, since some of the nodes were registered to the longitude and latitude coordinates of (0.0) and (1.1).
