NEAT: Network Experiment Automation Tool

Abstract:

Executing network experiments is crucial for validating results of networking research, but the process is often highly manual and seldomly reproducible. This slows down the innovation process, and peer reviews cannot be carried out appropriately, as it is hard to understand and reproduce the system-under-test. This paper presents an abstract view on network experiments and sketches the design of NEAT, a first prototype to automate network experiments in physical networks using state-of-the-art automation technologies. Using NEAT, experiments can be defined in a transparent humanand machine-readable manner allowing automated execution for higher efficiency, flexibility and reproducibility.