Testbeds are a key tool for evaluating and benchmarking IoT solutions. Several public testbeds are being run by institutions around the world. These are built with a variety of tools, and are typically "heavy" installations with dedicated wiring, hard installations, switches, servers, and a reservation and experiment management back-end. To complement those, we have taken the opposite, minimalistic, approach in designing the OpenTestBed. The OpenTestBed features all the tools necessary to build a testbed from off-the-shelf components such as Raspberry Pi single-board computers, OpenMote B low-power wireless devices, and glass domes. Each TestBox in the testbed connects to an MQTT broker over WiFi, no dedicated wiring or back-end is needed. The Inria-Paris OpenTestBed testbed of 80 motes has cost only 9,480 euros, and is open-access. The OpenTestBed is a fully open-source and open-hardware project, which several institutions have already adopted.

Abstract-The federation of Future Internet testbeds as envisaged by the Fed4FIRE project is a complex undertaking. It combines a large number of existing, independent testbeds in a single federation, and presents them to the experimenter as if it were a single infrastructure. Operating and using such an infrastructure requires a profound knowledge of the status of the health of the underlying independent systems. Inspired by network monitoring techniques used to operate the Internet today, this paper considers how a centralized health monitoring system can be set up in a federated environment of Future Internet Experimentation Facilities. We show why it is a vital tool for experimenters and First Level Support in the federation, which health monitoring information must be captured, and how this information can be displayed most appropriately.