Building a Lightweight Testbed Using Devices in Personal Area Networks

Abstract

Various networking applications and systems must be tested before the final deployment. Many of the tests are performed on network testbeds such as Emulab, PlanetLab, etc. These testbeds are large in scale and organize devices in relatively fixed ways. It is difficult for them to incorporate the latest personalized devices, such as smart watches, smart glasses and other emerging gadgets, so they tend to fall short in supporting personalized experiments using devices around users. Moreover, these testbeds commonly impose restrictions on users in terms of when and where to carry out experiments making them clumsy or inconvenient to use. This paper proposes to build a testbed using users' devices in their own personal area networks (PANs). We have designed and implemented a prototype of this system, which we call PANBED. Our experiments show that PANBED allows users to set up different scenes to test applications using a home router, PCs, mobile phones and other equipment. PANBED is light weighted with a size less than 16 KB and it has little impact to the other functions of the PAN. When one node keeps on sending 32-bytes packets to another for 30 seconds, PANBED exhibited little impact on the memory of the router, and the CPU load of the router was always less than 25%.