On creating overlay routing topologies between heterogeneous experimental facilities

Numerous Future Internet initiatives around the world establish experimental facilities that enable researchers to run their experiments in real world conditions. Through virtualization technologies, researchers have access to a large number of resources to run their experiments. The facilities provide different resources (e.g. sensors, end-hosts, routers), virtualization methods and access policies (private, community-based shared, federated) to accommodate a wide range of experiments. Nevertheless, for some experiments it is necessary to use resources across testbeds. Today, the support for integrating resources in one common routing topology is missing. In this paper we discuss use cases where a routing overlay over different heterogeneous testbeds is needed and present an implementation of a routing overlay mechanism to integrate nodes from Planetlab, VINI, and G-Lab. We identified the need for common resource federation mechanisms and tools that ease the setup of experimental facility resources across administrative domains and across different facilities.