Methodology Definition for Reliable Network Experimentation

As researchers in the networking area keep adopting experimental network testing as a valid mechanism to develop, validate, and improve their research, it becomes more apparent that an overall framework supporting and assisting during the experimentation process is necessary. Particularly, this assistance is relevant in processes such as experiment preparation, or results validation. As a consequence, the goal, and thus the contribution, of this paper is twofold, on the one hand we propose a novel set of guidelines which establish the set of requirements any testbed for network experimentation should follow. On the other hand, as the other relevant contribution of this work, we propose a mechanism for generating meta-data information on the experiments that ease the publication of the obtained datasets. Finally, as a use-case, we present a particular implementation of this framework which we deploy in a real scenario to prove the capabilities of the proposed testing procedure.