Rumba: A python framework for automating large-scale Recursive Internet Experiments on GENI and FIRE+

Abstract

A number of recent EU-funded projects have been investigating the Recursive Internet Architecture (RINA). IRATI built an initial prototype implementation, which was extended by the PRISTINE project towards technology demonstrators showing the feasibility of the architecture and demonstrating how RINA tackles security and reliability and how it can simplify network management. Currently, ARCFIRE sets out to evaluate realistic network scenarios, scaling up experiments in terms of numbers of nodes, services and running time. In this paper we present Rumba, a free open source experimentation framework developed within ARCFIRE in order to drastically reduce the time required to deploy and conduct such large experiments. Rumba is powerful yet easy to use. It provides a simple abstraction to model the RINA network as well as APIs for reserving testbed resources, installing the prototype, configuring and bootstrapping the recursive network, running the experiment scenario, collecting the results data and releasing the testbed resources. Rumba provides QEMU, jFed and emulab support to run experiments on a local machine or on various US and EU testbeds provided by GENI and FIRE+. Our experiences show that Rumba reduces the time required to configure and run large experiments using the RINA prototypes by several orders of magnitude.

ARCFIRE: Experimentation with the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture

“…Both observations are of course simply because more hops are used to reach the destination. We demonstrated that the experiment is very reproducible, largely thanks to Rumba [10].…”

“…These tools showed it was necessary to automate the execution of large experiments, since doing this manually is error-prone, hard to reproduce, and very time consuming. To fill this gap, ARCFIRE developed Rumba [10]. Rumba is an experimentation framework that supports existing testbeds provided by the American GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) and the European FIRE initiatives via the jFed and Emulab experiment management software.…”

Design of the Ouroboros packet network

“…Ouroboros 2 is a novel (recursive) network architecture that incorporates the experience we gained during research collaborations on RINA [108], as well as a thorough revisiting of a lot of early network research literature that formed the origins for most computer networking concepts. From a high level perspective, Ouroboros looks very similar to RINA, as evidenced by the Rumba [107] framework, which can be used to deploy the IRATI [38] and rlite [66] RINA implementations as well as our Ouroboros prototype [100]. The system research approach [83] to building Ouroboros adopts the UNIX design philosophy where each program does one thing well [69].…”