Building an Experimental Infrastructure for B3G Testing Using an Event-based Distributed System

Wireless networking segments of different technologies are going to coexist and interoperate in the context of a future IP next generation network. This coexistence and interoperation creates a number of open research and standardization issues making the necessity of testing an important key enabler towards the transmission of existing wireless networks to the next generation ones. A de facto requirement for reliable B3G testing is the formation of big infrastructures that provide advance testing facilities incorporating a number of hardware and software components, clusters, tetsbeds. The paper discusses the formation of such a big testing infrastructure called virtual distributed testbed (VDT) that offers the capability for advance B3G radio resource management testing, especially algorithms concerning both cross-layer and cross-system optimization. As VDT is structured around an event-based logic, its macroscopic picture resembles to an event-based distributed system. Building on this perspective, the paper exhibits the VDT features exploiting relevant scientific literature. All these features are going to be implemented in the context of the EC-funded UNITE project. The outcome of this project targets to be an event-based virtual distributed testbed that is going to be used for exhaustive B3G cross-layer/cross-system testing.