Testing a community network testbed control system

TL;DR: It is shown how the application of a container-based unit testing approach has a positive impact on development efforts and testbed stability and on the verification of community network testbed control software.

Abstract: Development and continuous operation of network management systems is a major challenge to future networks, where a large number of semi-independent devices jointly try to realize a working network. This work considers network testbed management, and more specifically on testbed management software for community networks. Because of the inherently unstructured and chaotic nature of community networks, managing components inside a community network with a frequently varying and unpredictable performance is particularly challenging. This paper focuses on the verification of community network testbed control software which has to cope with these challenges. We show how the application of a container-based unit testing approach has a positive impact on development efforts and testbed stability.