Overview

Merge is a testbed platform that's composed of a centralized portal that acts as an experimentation hub for a distributed system of testbed facilities. The basic motivation behind the Merge architecture is to enable rapid experimentation across vastly different types of devices and networks. Rapid applies to both experimenters and resource providers. Experimenters should be able to quickly and easily express the resource requirements for their experiments, define experiments based on those requirements - and then allocate, materialize and execute experiments efficiently. Likewise, resource providers should be able to rapidly describe the resources they can provide, and build an experiment materialization system around those resources without having to re-invent basic testbed functions.

Enabling rapid experimentation across a resource base that keeps up with the pace of technology evolution, requires defining complexity boundaries that allow for the incorporation of new types of devices and networks while preserving a consistent and stable interface for experimenters and resource providers. The first thing the Merge architecture does to address this, is separating the experiment infrastructure problem into experiment space and resource space.

Experiment space contains technologies and systems that directly support experimenters. This includes

• hosting user and project workspaces
• model development libraries for experiment expression
• experiment compilers
• resource discovery and allocation systems
• experiment visualization
• attachment points into live experiments for orchestration and device access experiment control
• APIs for experiment and project management

Resource space contains technologies and systems that directly support resource providers. This includes a modular set of technologies that can be combined as needed under an experiment materialization runtime to rapidly create testbed facilities. The testbed technology stack includes subsystems critical to operating a testbed such as

• node imaging
• virtual network synthesis
• container based experiment service provisioning
• secure and isolated external access through experiment VPNs

The experiment space technologies come together as a centralized experimentation portal. Experiment facilities register with a portal by commissioning a set of resources via testbed model exchange with a Merge portal. The portal is a turn-key open-source system that is freely available and can be deployed by anyone interested in creating a dedicated testbed ecosystem. We maintain a reference implementation at mergetb.net. Once a portal has been deployed and at least one testbed facility has commissioned resources, everything needed for users to start creating experiments is ready. As more facilities are added, more resource become available but the overall experiment development process for users does not change.