Integration of 3G Connectivity in PlanetLab Europe

Abstract__Distributed research testbeds play a fundamental
role in the evaluation of disruptive innovations
for the Future Internet. In recent years, the main research
funding agencies have promoted several initiatives
aimed at designing and building open, large
scale, realistic experimental facilities that could be used
to evaluate innovative networking architectures, paradigms
and services. In this paper, after discussing the
main challenges in building such infrastructures, we
present how, by leveraging the concept of federation,
we managed to introduce a first degree of heterogeneity
into PlanetLab Europe, a European testbed federated
with PlanetLab, by providing UMTS connectivity to
PlanetLab Europe nodes. Our contribution is just a first
step of an evolutionary path whose further developments
will lead to next generation large-scale heterogeneous
testbeds for supporting experimentally-driven
research on the Network of the Future (Preliminary
results within the same framework of this work have
been recently published in Canonico et al. (2007) and
Botta et al. (2008)).