OctoBot: An Open-Source Orchestration System for a Wide Range Network Activity Generation

Abstract

Experimentation in a large-scale testbed environment requires a large amount of emulated traffic to ensure realistic scenario execution and better experiment results. A large number of human-generated network activities can emulate traffic from real network users. Deploying and producing a single activity from an individual user is simple, but emulating and automating it from multiple users with a wide range of activities is challenging. We designed a containerized human agent (i.e., bot) to generate a single activity. Thus, a large number of bots can be deployed and controlled by a single orchestration system. Due to the complexity and wide-range usage of container orchestration systems, we need to develop a simpler system that leverages widely-used open-source container orchestrator. So, researchers and scientists can easily use it to define and execute activity requirements with a few command lines or a single specification file. This work shows the implementation of an orchestration system with several unique bots and their deployment in a production testbed environment. Several activity use cases are also presented to verify their functionality to support large-scale experimentation.