A New Slicing Scheme for Efficient Use of Wireless Testbeds * Angelos-Christos Anadiotis † Apostolos Apostolaras † Dimitris Syrivelis † Thanasis Korakis ‡ Leandros Tassiulas † Dept. of Computer and Communications Engineering University of Thessaly † {aganadio, apaposto, jsyr, leandros }@inf.uth.gr ‡ { korakis@poly.edu} ABSTRACT The gradually growing need for testbed use so as networking algorithms to be validated in real environments, has given rise to optimal utilization of testbed resources. Despite the fact that, many laboratories around the globe have deployed testbeds, so as experimenters have the opportunity to test their algorithms, the majority of those testbeds suffer from bad management that prevents users from efficiently ex- ploiting testbed’s resources. Moreover, as the number of testbed users increases, experimenters needs for more so- phisticated allocation of testbed resources are growing. To- ward, this direction, we propose a managerial framework that exploits testbed utilization by introducing slicing over frequency spectrum. This new framework will allow a more sophisticated way to optimally control and manage network resources of a testbed. Lab’s website: http://nitlab.inf.uth.gr Keywords Slicing, Network Virtualization, Wireless Testbed Frame- work 1. SLICING AND NETWORK VIRTUALIZA- TION The significant drawback of testbeds deployed for experi- mental reasons is that they are used locally and in a single- user mode. The typical problem that is occurred after a testbed deployment, is the testbed reservation process. The testbed assignment is usually done by an oral agreement between users. As a result, it is very likely inconsistencies and errors to happen, since users may use the same network resources due to the informal way of the oral agreement. Subsequently, this method of assignment rules out the prob- * The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Pro- gramme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n  a224263 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. WiNTECH’09, September 21, 2009, Beijing, China. Copyright 2009 ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$10.00. ability of retrieving reliable results and measures are less likely to represent real information. Figure 1: NITOS Scheduler Calendar. Due to the above limitations, wireless testbed ORBIT [5] in WINLAB [3] has developed a management mechanism that offers users the ability to book and reserve remotely the testbed at available time slots. As a result, every user knows exactly when another experimenter uses the testbed and po- tential conflicts and inconsistencies are prevented. However, the particular system design does not take into considera- tion that a sufficient large number of testbed nodes is left idle, since in the majority of the experiments applied, just a small number of nodes is being used. This is a significant design drawback as it leaves a part of testbed resources un- exploited. Taking into consideration the above structural defect, it is important for a management mechanism to in- corporate slicing features, in terms of applying concurrent use of a testbed at the same time by many users. It is straightforward to comprehend that this mechanism must prevent users from interfering with each other by attack- ing the problem of choosing the same frequency spectrum. Specifically, the new managerial mechanism must allocate a particular group of channels to a group of nodes that is assigned to a specific user and must monitor users activity to deter malicious intruders. Slicing can be considered as a part of a larger entity which is known as network virtualization. Particularly, network virtualization combines hardware, software resources and network functionality into a software based administrative entity, called virtual network. Slicing belongs to internal