Don't Repeat Yourself: Seamless Execution and Analysis of Extensive Network Experiments

Abstract: This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a generic framework for network experiments that significantly increases efficiency and ensures reproducibility. To this end, MACI incorporates and integrates established simulators and analysis tools to foster rapid but systematic network experiments. We found MACI indispensable in all phases of the research and development process of various communication systems, such as i) an extensive DASH video streaming study, ii) the systematic development and improvement of Multipath TCP schedulers, and iii) research on a distributed topology graph pattern matching algorithm. With this work, we make MACI publicly available to the research community to advance efficient and reproducible network experiments.