Testbed

The NetCloud testbed is an edge computing facility, utilized both for research and lab sessions across various teaching modules at undergraduate and graduate level. The testbed consists of 3 Dell PowerEdge R440 servers, each one equipped with 2 x 8-core Intel Xeon Silver CPUs (2.1 GHz, 11 MB L3) and 128 GB RAM, as well as 2 Dell PowerEdge R750 servers, each one equipped with a 16-core Intel Xeon Silver CPU (2.4 GHz, 24 MB L3) and 80 GB RAM. All servers are connected to a Cisco Catalyst 2960S switch with 24 ports. In addition, a Cisco RV320 VPN router is installed in order to provide secure management access to the facility.

 

All servers are virtualized using Xen Orchestra. OpenStack and OpenSourceMANO have been also installed, enabling the deployment, management, and orchestration of virtualized network functions (VNFs). Available software images for a wide range of VNFs (e.g., firewall, monitoring, IDS, object identification using Tensorflow) facilitate VNF deployment in OpenStack compute nodes. In addition, a Kubernetes cluster has been set up, empowering the deployment and management of cloud-native applications, as well as virtual counterparts of IoT devices for the needs of IoT-oriented projects. The testbed also provides support for software-defined datapaths and SDN control platforms for service chaining. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) functionalities are also supported, based on TAPRIO and Centralized Network Controller (CNC).