Federating future internet testbeds: an adaptor-based approach

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a work-in-progress project on adaptorbased approach for GENI federation. By federation we mean the seamless inter-connection between heterogeneous infrastructures for future Internet research, assuming those infrastructures are based on or similar to the Slice-based Federation Architecture (SFA)[1]. As a first step forward to federation, we implemented an adaptor for FirstProNET, a control framework of NP-based virtualized programmable platform by ETRI, to federate with GENI, specifically the ProtoGENI control framework [2][3]. While the concept and common API of the SFA are simple and general enough, implementation tweaks and workarounds are inevitable for interworking smoothly among heterogeneous systems. Furthermore it requires compatibility in a semantics level to abide by standard interfaces or agreed rules, so the adaptor takes care of underlying tasks that can't be done with syntactic translation. The role of the adaptor is twofold: providing a general and efficient translation mechanism for exchanging various APIs and resource specifications by static XML transformation, while abstracting away implementation details by modularizing internal tasks and adopting meta APIs such as Libvirt and Open vSwitch. The adaptor provides a simple but realistic solution for federation, and will work as a steppingstone for more general and complex federation architecture.