Multipath routing slice experiments in federated testbeds

The Internet today consist of many heterogeneous infrastructures, owned and maintained by separate and potentially competing administrative authorities. On top of this a wide variety of applications has different requirements with regard to quality, reliability and security from the underlying networks. The number of stakeholders who participate in provisioning of network and services is growing. More demanding applications (like eGovernment, eHealth, critical and emergency infrastructures) are on the rise. Therefore we assume that these two basic characteristics, a) multiple authorities and b) applications with very diverse demands, are likely to stay or even increase in the Internet of the future. In such an environment federation and virtualization of resources are key features that should be supported in a future Internet. The ability to form slices across domains that meet application specific requirements enables many of the desired features in future networks. In this paper, we present a Multipath Routing Slice experiment that we performed over multiple federated testbeds. We combined capabilities from different experimental facilities, since one single testbed did not offer all the required capabilities. This paper summarizes the conducted experiment, our experience with the usability of federated testbeds and our experience with the use of advanced measurement technologies within experimental facilities. We believe that this experiment provides a good example use case for the future Internet itself because we assume that the Internet will consist of multiple different infrastructures that have to be combined in application specific overlays or routing slices, very much like the experimental facilities we used in this experiment. We also assume that the growing demands will push towards a much better measurement instrumentation of the future Internet. The tools used in our experiment can provide a starting point for this.