Research Devices as a Service for Community Networks (updated abstract)

The Community-lab testbed introduces nodes at the edges of the Community network in order to give an environment where Community network members can easily deploy experiments on the nodes. However, there are limitations with the number of physical nodes that the Community-lab has deployed. Therefore, we propose that we can extend this number of testbeds in a virtualized way, without the need of adding new physical nodes to the network. Also, it would seem to be a good addition to have as a new automated service for community members in the Cloudy.community Operating System so that members can deploy their own nodes with ease. Furthermore, we postulate two solutions, using virtualization, by using a virtual machine (QEmu emulation); or by using linux containers (LXC containers). Both solutions can have their advantages and disadvantages, and work within different environments. We are currently in the testing phase of our solutions, in order to gather an evaluation for a paper that we are going to submit in the coming weeks. Therefore, we appreciate any feedback on the way we deploy our solutions and also for the measurements needed to have a more complete evaluation of the community-lab virtualized nodes.