ExCovery – A Framework for Distributed System Experiments and a Case Study of Service Discovery

	Authors: Andreas Dittrich Stefan Wanja Miroslaw Malek 28th IEEE International Symposium on Parallel Distributed Processing, Workshops and PhD Forum, IPDPSW 2014, Phoenix, AZ, USA, May 19-23, 2014 Download: accepted version, final published version GitHub Project Page and Source Repository

Experiments are a fundamental part of science. They are needed when the system under evaluation is too complex to be analytically described and they serve to empirically validate hypotheses. This work presents the experimentation framework ExCovery for dependability analysis of distributed processes. It provides concepts that cover the description, execution, measurement and storage of experiments. These concepts foster transparency and repeatability of experiments for further sharing and comparison. ExCovery has been tried and refined in a manifold of dependability related experiments during the last two years. A case study is provided to describe service discovery as experiment process. A working prototype for IP networks runs on the Distributed Embedded System (DES) wireless testbed at the Freie Universität Berlin.