Vehicular testbed management

The deployment of vehicular network testbeds encompasses a myriad of new challenges regarding resource management, execution of experiments on the nodes, and the collection of the resulting data, when compared to traditional testbeds. Vehicular nodes have very unpredictable mobility patterns, especially in cities, and use a specific communication protocol; therefore, the commonly used solutions for large scale testbeds are not directly applicable. This is the case of our vehicular network testbed developed in the framework of the DRIVE-IN and Future Cities! (DRIVE-IN and Future Cities!)¹ projects. This paper tackles the aforementioned issues by proposing the design and implementation of a testbed management system based on the cOntrol and Management Framework (OMF). The base functionalities of OMF were extended to integrate node control over cellular networks, as well as to guarantee that experiments are always safely deployed, minimizing the risk of node corruption and malfunctioning. The management platform is capable of uploading new software to the vehicular nodes, conduct experiments using the specific vehicular wireless (IEEE 802.11p) interface, collect the resulting data, as well as storing and managing information about all the nodes. The results obtained from real-world experiments show that the the proposed platform is able to manage a Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) testbed.