ExCovery -- A Framework for Distributed System Experiments and a Case Study of Service Discovery

Experiments are a fundamental part of science. They are needed when the system under evaluation is too complex to be analytically described and they serve to empirically validate hypotheses. This work presents the experimentation framework ExCovery for dependability analysis of distributed processes. It provides concepts that cover the description, execution, measurement and storage of experiments. These concepts foster transparency and repeatability of experiments for further sharing and comparison. ExCovery has been tried and refined in a manifold of dependability related experiments during the last two years. A case study is provided to describe service discovery (SD) as experiment process (EP). A working prototype for IP networks runs on the Distributed Embedded System (DES) wireless testbed at the Freie Universität Berlin.