The GENI Test Automation Framework for New Protocol Development

The National Science Foundation’s GENI testbed provides an open infrastructure environment for researchers to develop networking protocols from the ground up. During implementation and testing of a networking protocol, researchers typically begin with small scale topologies to show initial proof of concept before moving on to larger scale topologies. For small scale topologies, it is feasible to manually deploy, compile, and execute protocol code and collect performance metrics. However, when testing with topologies of tens of nodes or larger, the manually intensive task of code deployment, compilation, execution, and metrics collection becomes infeasible. To combat this issue, we present an automation framework for the GENI testbed that requires very little user interaction and utilizes existing GENI APIs and constructs, including the manifest RSPEC file, to perform automated testing of a networking protocol. In this article, we provide the details of the automation framework and its use in the development and evaluation of a new Layer 2.5 protocol, namely the Multi Node Label Routing protocol. The framework can also be used for collection of performance metrics in an automated fashion.