Outdoor Testbed

NITOS outdoor testbed consists of powerful nodes that feature multiple wireless interfaces and allow for experimentation with heterogeneous (WiFi, WiMAX, LTE) wireless technologies. It is deployed at the exterior of the University of Thessaly (UTH) campus building, as illustrated in the following Figure.

More specifically, it consists of 45 nodes of different types, namely 10 Orbit - like nodes, 20 custom made Outdoor nodes and 15 Diskless nodes. 

Deployment

 The NITOS Outdoor testbed’s server room is the place where all necessary equipment for the interconnection of the wireless nodes is held, inside two racks. As illustrated in the figure at the right, the first rack contains the server of the testbed, a UPS and the nodes’ plugs connected to the power supply. The server machine hosts multiple virtual machines, each one standing for a different service providing by the NITOS facility. Namely, the NITOS server for wireless experimentation, the OpenFlow controller and 2 web site servers.

The NITOS server is used to run experiments on the testbed through OMF, and to host various network services including DHCP, DNS, NTP, TFTP, PXE, Frisbee, MySQL, OML and Apache. It is also responsible for scheduling of the testbed’s resources and for handling users’ requests to access the testbed. It also keeps valuable information for experimentation such as users’ hard disk images, databases containing measurements from experiments and other useful information.

The second rack as illustrated in the figure at the left, contains all necessary switches of the testbed interconnected with the nodes, according to the network architecture described here.