European Sixth Framework Network of Excellence FP6-2004-IST-026854-NoE Deliverable D2.3 Virtual Laboratory Integration Report

Abstract

This third “Virtual Laboratory Integration Report”, also the last report of the first EMANICS phase, presents the on-going activities of the virtual laboratory and common test-beds work package (WP2). The work package currently entertains four activities: 1. Creation and maintenance of a VoIP management test-bed (VOIP) 2. Network management trace collection and analysis (TRACE) 3. Trace collection for network replay (REPLAY) 4. Resource usage data collection (ABLOMERS) Comparing with the first and second “Virtual Laboratory and Integration Report”, submitted six and twelve months ago, these activities have been stretched on many aspects including the degree of collaboration, the scalability and diversity of activities and the achievement of activities. This report provides the detailed updates of these activities during the last six-month period, which further emphasize the achievement and collaboration. In particular, the VOIP project has seen several essential evolutions of the already-built VoIP infrastructure of the various partners. During the project meeting in February 15-16 in Munich, several sub-projects were defined that take advantage of the infrastructure. The TRACE project has proposed a systematic approach to trace analysis. The project has received contributions and supports from several other partners, who are interested in trace collection and analysis. The REPLAY project has made sound progress in both research on a decentralized and asynchronous protocol, namely A-GAP, and collection of real traffic traces from various locations. The main contribution of this project is a trace repository used by researchers within EMANICS but also outside of EMANICS. The ABLOMERS project has implemented an open source monitoring approach for resource management in large-scale networks, performed various experiments in a real scenario and obtained a lot of promising results. In general, this work package has not only made significant progress according to the originally defined objectives, but also addressed several issues found in the previous deliverables: (i) The VoIP test-bed reached a state where it can be utilized thoroughly for research activities. (ii) The demand of good analysis tools is crucial due to the huge amount of traces and their complexity; collaboration on the creation of such analysis tools is progressing well. (iii) Confidentiality issues needed further discussion between EMANICS partners in order to come up with effective ways to share data. More importantly, the work package has achieved closer collaboration among the EMANICS partners involved in each project. Several partners outside EMANICS have expressed their interests in contributing to the projects and some are already collaborating with EMANICS partners, which essentially increases the degree of collaboration achieved.