Service Delivery and Testbed Framework

• March 2012 - Release of OMF 5.4.1. This release brings a new visualisation engine to graphically display experiment data, and a post-install scripts to facilitate OMF's deployment on new testbeds. More details at: http://mytestbed.net/news/29

• March 2012 - The OMF+OML team is a partner in a new GENI-NSF project "GIMI: Large-scale GENI Instrumentation and Measurement Infrastructure". 

• December 2011 - Release of OMF 5.4 with many new features, such as the support for additional wireless driver, resizing of disk image, all communications over pubsub. More details at: http://mytestbed.net/news/28

• June 2011 - Release of OML v2.6, which improves the measurement collection system, adds support for PostgreSQL database backend, and strengthens security on the server side. More details at: http://mytestbed.net/news/23

The network research community has been arguing that it is time to rethink the Internet’s basic architecture. In 2005 the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the GENI Initiative to develop clean-slate architectures that provide security, accommodate new technologies, and are easier to manage. This was soon followed by similar initiatives in Europe, Japan, and Korea, with the EU alone expected to invest 1B Euro. A core component of all these initiatives is the development of experimental infrastructures or testbeds that can be used to prove that a new architecture is really better than the current one. 

NICTA's Networking research group has been leading the design and development of OMF and OML, a testbed management framework with comprehensive experiment life-cycle support, for many years. This work was started by WINLAB at Rutgers University in the context of the NSF-funded Orbit project, which is now considered one of the core technology components of GENI. It received the 2008 Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation.

Under NICTA's leadership, OMF and OML have been extended with many novel and unique features, and are now deployed on multiple testbeds word-wide, and used daily by many researchers and students. Based on this expertise, NICTA participated to three successfully completed international projects funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (OneLab and NADA) and the NSF Global Environment for Network Innovations (ORBIT), and is currently a partner in three recently started FP7 and GENI NSF projects (OpenLab, FIBRE, and GIMI). Within these initiatives, NICTA will further grow the capabilities and the deployment of OMF & OML.

This project will develop and deploy the OMF & OML frameworks to control, instrument, and manage federations of networking testbeds. This project will extensively modify and extend the current OMF & OML along the three following directions: support for complete life cycle of an experimental study, support for heterogeneous experimental resources, support for efficient resource sharing among users and federations of testbeds. OMF is currently the only control and management software that is being used by institutions within both EU and US testbed initiatives. This project will also develop and promote the use of the IREEL platform, which is an eLearning platform for networking teaching based on OMF & OML.

We expect that the adoption and use of OMF & OML on a global scale will contribute to the increase of scientific rigour in networking experimental studies, the increase of data quality and sharing within the networking community, and the improvement of networking teaching at universities.

Industrial and academic researchers in networking will use OMF & OML to design, instrument, and execute reproducible experiments on multiple type of testbed platforms. These frameworks will provide them with tools to support all steps in their experiment study cycle. 

Research institutions providing these testbeds will use the services provided by OMF & OML to easily manage their offered experimental resources, and optimise their usage through sharing via federation and virtualisation.

• Strong existing deployment and user base in the networking community (list of deployment sites)
• Support for all steps of an experimental study cycle
• Support for efficient resource sharing among experimenters (virtualisation) and institutions (federation)
• Open source and strong contribution from third parties

Selected Publications

A complete list of our OMF & OML related publications is available on NICTA's publication database.

“Why simulate when you can experience?”
G. Jourjon, T. Rakotoarivelo, and M. Ott
ACM SIGCOMM Education Workshop, August 2011. 

“Impact of IREEL on CSE Lectures”
G. Jourjon, S. Kanhere, J. Yao
ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), June 2011. 

“A Portal to Support Rigorous Experimental Methodology in Networking Research”
G. Jourjon, T. Rakotoarivelo, and M. Ott
7th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TRIDENTCOM 2011), Shanghai, China, April 2011. - Best Paper Award 

“Measurement Architectures for Network Experiments with Disconnected Mobile Nodes”
J. White, G. Jourjon, T. Rakotoarivelo, and M. Ott
6th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TRIDENTCOM 2010), Berlin, Germany, May 2010 
PDF Presentation 

“OMF: A Control and Management Framework for Networking Testbeds”
T. Rakotoarivelo, M. Ott, G. Jourjon, and I. Seskar
4th ACM Workshop on Real Overlays and Distributed Systems (ROADS'09), Montana, USA, October 2009
Selected for re-print in ACM Operating Systems Review (OSR), vol. 43 (4), pp. 54-59, January 2010. 
PDF Presentation

“Mobile Experiments Made Easy with OMF/Orbit”
C. Dwertmann, E. Mesut, G. Jourjon, M. Ott, T. Rakotoarivelo, and I. Seskar
Poster and Demonstration at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, Barcelona, Spain, August 2009 
Video of the Demonstration

Linkage and Collaboration

OMF & OML Project Team

Rodney Berriman, Christoph Dwertmann, Jack Hong, Guillaume Jourjon, Olivier Mehani, Max Ott, Thierry Rakotoarivelo.

For more information about this project, please contact Thierry Rakotoarivelo or Max Ott: { thierry.rakotoarivelo , max.ott } AT nicta.com.au