A federated experiment environment for emulab-based testbeds

We describe an architecture for creating experimental environments across multiple cooperating Emulab-based testbeds, called the DETER Federation Architecture (DFA). The system uses cooperative resource allocation and multiple-level testbed access to create a cohesive environment for experimentation. Testbeds that contribute resources continue to exert their own resource allocation and access policies. The architecture is designed to scale. We describe a prototype implementation.