Project Number

1599

Project Title

Slivers and Slices in a Diverse, Outdoor, Mobile Network Testbed

Testbed name: Diverse Outdoor Mobile Environment (DOME)
a.k.a., Vehicular Mobile Network (obsolete title)

Technical Contacts

Principal Investigator: Brian Levine, UMass Amherst, brian email at cs.umass.edu ​http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/brian
Co-Principal Investigator: Mark Corner, UMass Amherst, mcorner email at cs.umass.edu ​http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/mcorner/
Research Staff: Brian Lynn, UMass Amherst, blynn email at cs.umass.edu ​http://www.cs.umass.edu/~blynn/

Participating Projects and Organizations

​Diverse Outdoor Mobile Environment (DOME) project
​UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA
​Microsoft Research, Redmond,WA
​HP Laboratories, Princeton, NJ
​Intel Research, Hillsboro, OR
​Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA

Scope

The scope of work on this project is to extend the DOME outdoor, mobile network testbed to support slivering and utilize a GENI candidate control framework (ORCA). This work includes the following items. 1) A virtualized operating system on the vehicular computers using Xen, which will allow for the isolation of experiments and customization of the operating environment, as well as permitting each experiment to begin from a known configuration. 2) Virtualized access to attached devices, including a 802.11 radio, GPS, and 900 MHz radio on each bus. 3) Standardized, general GENI mechanisms to authenticate users, install customized software and experiments, schedule DOME resources, and to log results. 4) Integration, deployment and access to GENI users.

Current Capabilities

The DOME software has been completed. This includes:
1) Final testing of the ability to run user-defined experiments in a virtual environment on the bricks (computers on the buses).
2) The completion of the DOME portal; the portal allows users to upload files (VM partitions), create experiments, schedule experiments and perform maintenance tasks.
3) Field verification of the disruption tolerant interface between the buses and the portal for downloading experiments and communicating leases.
4) The addition of a logging facility with persistent storage and an export facility, integrated with the portal.
5) A workaround to allow the canceling of leases was implemented in the DieselNet Controller, and an interface was provided via the DOME portal.
6) The DOME GENI software was distributed to all buses in August; this involved re-imaging and re-installing the hard drives on all bricks.
7) DOME completed its integration with ORCA; the ability to distribute actors between UMass and RENCI was verified.
8) We implemented DOLPHIN, a lightweight scheduler that allows us to temporarily take ORCA offline to perform maintenance and install ORCA updates without disrupting DOME on the buses.
9) DOME's virtualization capabilities were demonstrated at GEC5. We showed the ability to schedule and launch experiments on a DOME brick. This was done using ORCA as the framework.

The availability of DOME has been announced to external GENI researchers:
1) Documentation and software was posted to ​GENI - DOME web site and portal.
2) Various utilities to reduce the size of partitions, test the launching of experiments, generate log files, etc. were made available.
3) Examples of experiments, methods to access devices, etc. were posted on the portal.
4) Documentation was written and placed to the portal. This included documentation so that users can have their own development bricks.

Milestones

MilestoneDate(DOME: 1a Implement, integrate and document the required DieselNet hardware updates)? ​status
MilestoneDate(DOME: 1b Implement, integrate and document the Xen operating system and its virtualization features)? ​status
MilestoneDate(DOME: 1c Implement, integrate and document virtualized access to the WiFi radio)? ​status
MilestoneDate(DOME: 1d Import and setup a GENI-compliant control framework based on ORCA)? ​status
MilestoneDate(DOME: 1e Implement, integrate and document a first release (v1.0) of the software)? ​status
MilestoneDate(DOME: 1f Demo basic virtualization and experiment control functions)? ​status
DOME: 1g provide a VLAN connection from your testbed’s server to the Internet2 backbone network (Due 10/1/09) ​status
DOME: 1out Outreach activites in year 1 ​status

Project Technical Documents

Website maintained by UMass Amherst:

​GENI - DOME web site
​DOME Substrate Description, 2008
​Prototype DOME controller and handler modules for ORCA, 2009

Quarterly Status Reports

​DOME: 4Q08 Status Report
​DOME: 1Q09 Status Report
​DOME: 2Q09 Status Report
​DOME: 3Q09 Status Report
​DOME: Year 1 Final Report

Spiral 1 Connectivity

Location of equipment: For Spiral 1, all work will be done via a lab at UMassAmherst. However, the intention of this project is deploy equipment on mobile nodes in DieselNet. (See ​DOME Substrate Description for a description of all hardware, and see ​DOME Web Site for a description of DieselNet's current deployment.). Some engineering to prepare for mobile deployment will also be conducted during Spiral 1.

Layer 3 Connectivity: IP access will be through UMass Amherst's campus network, using their public IP addresses.

Layer 2 Connectivity: An MOU was agreed upon with the UMass Office of Information Technology (OIT) regarding connecting Internet2 to the DOME and ViSE servers, along with VLAN access; see ​http://groups.geni.net/geni/attachment/wiki/DOME/mou.pdf. There is currently no usable layer2 connection to the UMass Amherst lab available for GENI. The project is investigating the possibility of installing local fiber that could enable a connection to NLR through an appropriate regional network. If installed this fiber would support both the DOME and ViSE projects in Spiral 1 and in later stages that include support for mobile nodes. Layer 2 ethernets will not extend to the DieselNet nodes, due to limitations in the existing deployed systems, but IP tunnels to the layer 2 VLAN termination points should be feasible for connecting mobile endpoints to the GENI virtual ethernets.

IT contact at UMass Amherst ?

GPO Liason System Engineer

Harry Mussman ​hmussman@geni.net