Pieter Becue

Federating Wired and Wireless Test Facilities through Emulab and OMF: The iLab.t Use Case

The IBBT iLab.t technology centre provides computing hardware, software tools and measurement equipment to support researchers and developers in building their ICT solutions, and in measuring the performance of these solutions. Among other things, the iLab.t hosts several generic Emulab-based wired test environments called the Virtual Walls, and two wireless test environments which are grouped under the name w-iLab.t. Until very recently, these wired and wireless test facilities each had their own history: they were deployed and maintained by a different group of people, were operated using different tools, and each had their own community of experimenters. This paper provides insight on the origin and evolution of the Virtual Wall and w-iLab.t facilities. It explains how these facilities were federated, by using the best parts of both the OMF and Emulab frameworks. It discusses the benefits of our local federation as well as our future federation plans.

Distributed Ontology-Based Monitoring on the IBBT WiLab.t Infrastructure

Testbeds as a means to evaluate protocol and software development are gaining importance, not least because of the oftentimes unpredictable influence of environmental behaviour. IBBT, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, recognizes the importance of such testbeds and has therefore invested in WiLab.t, a wireless sensor and mesh testbed. It contains over 200 wireless and programmable nodes. The monitoring and management of such a testbed is very important so as to guarantee a proper functioning and stable environment to be used by researchers. This is however not a trivial task, even more so when in the future, the testbed is expanded with new devices and as such becomes a heterogeneous environment. Therefore, we have developed an ontology-based monitoring approach, which allows hiding the heterogeneity from the monitoring application and enables to process the data in a formal manner. Additionally, it allows adaptation according to characteristics of the local deployment, without the need to re-engineer the entire monitoring application every time alterations are made to the testbed.

A hybrid indoor localization solution using a generic architectural framework for sparse distributed wireless sensor networks

Indoor localization and navigation using wireless sensor networks is still a big challenge if expensive sensor nodes are not involved. Previous research has shown that in a sparse distributed sensor network the error distance is way too high. Even room accuracy can not be guaranteed. In this paper, an easy-to-use generic positioning framework is proposed, which allows users to plug in a single or multiple positioning algorithms. We illustrate the usability of the framework by discussing a new hybrid positioning solution. The combination of a weighted (range-based) and proximity (range-free) algorithm is made. Both solutions separately have an average error distance of 13.5m and 2.5m respectively. The latter result is quite accurate due to the fact that our testbeds are not sparse distributed. Our hybrid algorithm has an average error distance of 2.66m only using a selected set of nodes, simulating a sparse distributed sensor network. All our experiments have been executed in the iMinds testbed: namely at “de Zuiderpoort”. These algorithms are also deployed in two real-life environments: “De Vooruit” and “De Vijvers”.

The IBBT w-iLab.t: A Large-Scale Generic Experimentation Facility for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The w-iLab.t is a large-scale generic wireless experimentation facility. Over 260 wireless nodes are installed at two different locations. Every single wireless node is equipped with multiple wireless technologies, namely IEEE 802.15.4, Wi-Fi a/b/g(/n), and on some devices also Bluetooth. Additionally, w-iLab.t provides access to software defined radio platforms and also uses them to characterize the wireless environment during an experiment. The w-iLab.t flexibility and its tools enable experimenters to design and schedule a wide range of wireless experiments, and to collect and process results in a user-friendly way.

Remote Control of Robots for Setting Up Mobility Scenarios during Wireless Experiments in the IBBT w-iLab.t

The w-iLab.t is a large-scale generic wireless experimentation facility. Two locations are equipped with in total over 260 wireless nodes. In the w-iLab.t Zwijnaarde location mobile nodes are hosted. The mobile nodes are mounted on top of robots, of which the movement can be fully controlled by the experimenter. Due to a high accuracy positioning algorithm, the exact position of the robots is known at all time during the experiments. This enables us to provide repeatable and controlled mobile experiments to our users.

Troubleshooting Wireless Home Networks Using a Portable Testbed

Because of the recent advances in wireless technologies and, consequently the fast growing number of wireless devices that are being deployed in consumer houses, there is a growing demand from manufacturers to develop and deploy tools able to diagnose problems and evaluate the performance of their products prior to releasing them to the market. Such testing tools are required to be quickly deployable in real-life home environments and should support various wireless technologies and use cases. In order to avoid future product service failures and costly complex troubleshooting, the results should offer a full understanding of the product behavior on the field. Different approaches able to fulfill these objectives have been proposed in literature. In this paper, we propose a new portable and highly flexible testbed tool to evaluate the performance of wireless devices in consumer houses. Furthermore we demonstrate the feasibility and operation of the testbed in two real-life home environments for assessing the impact of range extenders on wireless communication performance.

Demo: a cognitive solution for commercial wireless conferencing system

In a modern conference room, various of video and audio devices are provided to ensure efficient communications. This is commonly referred to as a conferencing system. Compared to wired conferencing systems, wireless systems require less deployment effort, but may become unreliable when the selected radio spectrum is highly occupied. This demo focuses on improving the quality of service of a commercial wireless conferencing system using dynamic channel selection based on real-time spectrum sensing. The proposed solution is verified in a large-scale wireless testbed, and the result shows that the link of the conferencing system is indeed more robust against interference when cognitive solution is applied.