Overview
This laboratory is mainly devoted to experimental services, cloud, and networking research. The wide range of testing environments are built around the multi-purpose fully reconfigurable EXTREME Testbed® and two technology-specific extension testbed.
The core of the EXTREME testbed® lies on three Central Servers. They are the interface between the experimenter/user and the testbed. A series of reconfigurable multi-purpose network elements (40+ Intel-based servers with 4 Gigabit Ethernet cards) can be customized and used as network elements for experimentation purposes (e.g., traffic emulation, routing, switching, acting as access points, wireless clients, capturing packets…). The interconnection of the nodes for each experiment is configured in the backbone switch-router (a Cisco Catalyst C6513 switch router). Additionally, new Supermicro Intel-based servers with 40 vCPUs and 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports act as a small datacenter for network function virtualization, and cloud services experimentation, among others.
For the wireless infrastructure, the testbed offers a wide range of wireless devices: traffic generators and receivers, sniffers, mobile nodes, and mesh nodes using commercial WLAN gear (Access points, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad cards, LTE/3G cards, mobile phones) and heterogeneous computing nodes (USRPs, laptops, smartphones, embedded PCs) with wireless capabilities. Moreover, RF components are also available (coaxial cables, attenuators, splitters, combiners, and antennas) to scale the wireless experimentation to the laboratory size.
