NeXT: A Software-Defined Testbed with Integrated Optimization, Simulation and Experimentation

To support rigorous and repeatable experimental evaluation of wireless networked systems, the community has made significant efforts to develop experimentation platforms. However, existing platforms primarily focus on the data plane, i.e., the forwarding infrastructure, without explicitly considering the control plane. To fill this gap, in this work we develop NeXT, a software-defined testbed with integrated wireless network simulation, experimentation and optimization capabilities. We first design the data plane, which integrates an event-driven broadband wireless network simulator called UBSim and a software-defined wireless network testing facility called RoboNet. We then design NeXT's control plane, where a software toolchain is developed and deployed to support both traditional model-based optimization and new data-driven control techniques. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of NeXT by considering a series of wireless network optimization and control problems.