Panlab Offerings

This page gathers information to allow existing and upcoming projects to make use of the PII offerings. It explains in detail how costumer projects can build upon infrastructure and services provided by Panlab. This shall help the FIRE vision to become true.

Overall Panlab Concept and Roles

The Panlab infrastructure manages interconnection of different distributed testbeds to provide services to customers for various kind of testing. Such testing activities need support from a coordination center instantiated here as the so-called Panlab Office. This raises then the following main roles in the Panlab concept:

• Panlab Partner as the provider of infrastructural elements necessary to support the testing services. Partners are connected to the Panlab Office for offering functionality to the customers.
• Panlab customer utilizes a service provided by the Panlab office, (e.g. to carry out R&D activities, implement and evaluate new technologies, products, or services). They take benefit from the Panlab testing offerings.
• Panlab Office realizes a brokering service for the test facilities by coordinating i) the provision of the testing infrastructures and services, ii) the Panlab Partner test-sites iii) the communication path between them and customers

 The Panlab overall architecture relies on a number of additional architectural components including the Panlab search and composition engine called “Teagle” and a Panlab repository that stores testbed descriptions and testing results. In its most basic working mode,  Panlab offers to go manually through the operational steps for the creation and realization of testing projects. Operations are then executed by personnel of the Panlab Office involving partners and customers. Thus, the testbed metadata held in the Panlab repository is entered manually as well as testing configurations, etc. But in a more elaborated working mode, intending to automate the Panlab related processes, the so-called Teagle tool will offer, (among other functionalities) an online form where the testbed representatives can enter the relevant data describing the testbed  and its resources, and Panlab customers may then search the Panlab repository to find suitable resources needed for doing their tests.

The Panlab Architecture

Teagle - The Panlab architecture relies on a framework called “Teagle” which is a web instance that provides the means for a customer to express the testing needs and get feedback on where, how and when testing can take place. Teagle enables finding a suitable site for one’s testing needs within a database of partner testbeds and Teagle  manages the complete set-up of a desired infrastructure. This includes necessary resource reservations and interconnection of elements to serve a specific testing need. Thus, by using Teagle, the customers can select desired technologies and features for a test configuration to be set up. For federating different testbeds residing in autonomous administrative domains and provide composite infrastructures using resources across the boundaries of the domains, three major blocks of functionality need to be provided : i) Resource Description, ii) Service Exposure, and iii) Service Composition.

For resource description a common information model is defined. It allows Teagle to understand the functionality of resources, and to offer them to external users to provide compositions of distributed functionalities. Service exposure is realized thanks to a specific component, the PTM (PanLab Testbed Manager). Service composition is eventually achieved on the basis of the resource description of the available resources with instructions on how to invoke them and a dedicated composition tool building a workflow that defines how to provision the desired virtual environment as a composition of building blocks from different testbeds.

 PTM - It is implementing the interactions at the control layer between the set-up and configuration requests by Teagle and the components in the testbed it manages. The PTM is therefore capable to translate generic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) commands received from Teagle (REST messages) into resource specific communication (e.g. SNMP), thus, control commands applicable to the testbed component. Hence the PTM provides the mapping from federation level commands to resource specific commands.

IGW - The Interconnection Gateway is responsible for providing and controlling connectivity to other administrative domains. It ensures to interconnect testbeds and components inside the testbed with the peers that are part of the VCT configuration. Technically, this component is a border gateway function and policy enforcement point for each testbed. For the IP layer the IGW acts as a dynamically configurable entity implementing i) L2 connection/isolation of testbed devices, ii) VPNs, iii) firewall and filter and iv) application proxy and/or network address translation. 

RAL - The Resource Adaptation Layer is a concept to flexibly integrate the resources offered by testbed owners (Panlab Providers) in the PII platform. The actual instantiation of such an RAL is based on the accumulation of the runtime images of Resource Adaptors (RA). RAs are providing a common interface for communication towards the PTM modules while towards each resource they implement the resource specific communication and configuration protocols. Thus, the RAs are acting like device drivers form different testbed resources. The RAL is a framework for the communications of RAs with the core PTM allowing the RA developers to use their own methodology on condition that their developments consume from and provide to the PTM the designated services. As such, RAL is providing mechanisms that aid resource discovery and monitoring by generating specific change events to communicate the resource status as well as any control information to PTM components.  RAs are registered within the runtime framework of the PTM and make their presence known to the rest of the platform so that responsible PTM modules can enumerate these and keep track of all the corresponding event and changes regarding each specific resource representation and consequently the actual resource. Since the RAs are the only reference towards an actual resource, several events regarding status of both adaptor and resource can be reported such as for instance, failures in the operation of an RA, communication loss or failure with resources, resource failures, resource reset, upgrades (resource or adaptor), etc.

Each resource is represented by the corresponding RA as a set of attributes of various types (read/write parameters, actions, dependencies, etc). Aiming at achieving high granularity with respect to the parameterization of the resources and also keeping the complexity of the RA common interface as low as possible it uses the following communication schema:

• A generic XML schema catering for the description of all the possible configuration parameters a resource may be publishing
• For any parameter all the possible testbed design aspects are accommodated in its description, these are name, value type, edit-ability, default value.

Upon registration with the PTM, the RA developer or resource owner provides to the platform an XML document following the generic XML schema which is fed into the Teagle framework. The contained information must be adequate to integrate the represented resource in the Teagle design and orchestration engine. 

What is Teagle and how to use it

Teagle can be used via the Teagle Portal that allows to manage Virtual Customer Testbeds (VCT). Such testbeds are composed by a number of distributed software and hardware components situated in existing testbeds across Europe. It provides researchers with testing and prototyping environments that support very specific requirements.

Teagle is the central coordination instance that holds together all Panlab Partner test labs that are needed to provide a wide range of testing and prototyping possibilities. The Panlab Partner labs form a federation of testbeds.

The individual components provided by the Teagle framework are explained in our WIKI. This is work in progress.

Below you can find some tutorial videos that demonstrate the usage of Teagle components such as the VCT Tool. PII will offer training events to give even further insights and allow some hands-on experience. The training activities are currently being developed and will be announced soon via the Panlab website. Please check again later ...

Part 1: How to access the Teagle VCT Tool

Tutorial video ...

Part 2: How to use the Teagle VCT Tool to design a simple VCT

Tutorial video ...

Part 3: How to use the Teagle VCT Tool to design complex VCTs

Tutorial video ...

Reference Projects

Phosphorus is a FP6 project that addresses some of the key technical challenges to enable on-demand e2e network services across multiple domains over high speed optical networks.

Phosphorus testbed overview figure

HPDMnet is a consortium that builds a high performance digital media network that provides e2e network services accross multiple domains, like phosphorus but focuses on High Bandwidth media streaming like uncompressed HD.

HPDMnet testbed overview figure

Both of these testbeds can create dynamic network services modeled as Teagle Resources. This demonstration has been set up within 3 weeks in July 2009. This shows that integrating complex existing testbeds for Panlab control con be done with reasonable efforts. Furthermore, with this demonstration the Panlab Testbed Manager (PTM) as well as the Teagle framework have been tested for their flexibility and generality.

Resource adapters for the Harmony interface (Phosphorus) and the Chronos interface (HPDMnet) have been implemented. Also, there is a running PTM at the Canadian Innovation Cluster (CRC) which is linked to both testbeds that can be controlled via Teagle. It could be demonstrated to set up a path with specific bandwidth from Canada to Spain using Teagle and the underlying control framework.

Concept overview slide

More Information

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