COINS: ContinuOus IntegratioN in wirelesS technology development

TL;DR

COINS, a framework that can be used by wireless technology developers to enable CI practices in their testbed infrastructure, is proposed and a reference architecture and implementation of COINS is provided for controlled testing of multi-technology 5G MTC networks.

Abstract

Network testing plays an important role in the iterative process of developing new communication protocols and algorithms. However, test environments have to keep up with the evolution of technology and require continuous update and redesign. In this paper, we propose COINS, a framework that can be used by wireless technology developers to enable continuous integration (CI) practices in their testbed infrastructure. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a reference architecture and implementation of COINS for controlled testing of multi-technology 5G Machine Type Communication (MTC) networks. The implementation upgrades an existing wireless experimentation testbed with new software and hardware functionalities. It blends web service technology and operating system virtualization technologies with emerging Internet of Things technologies enabling CI for wireless networks. Moreover, we also extend an existing qualitative methodology for comparing similar frameworks and identify and discuss open challenges for wider use of CI practices in wireless technology development.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: A histogram of power spectral density samples over a 200 kHz wide band in the unlicensed European 868 MHz SRD band in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
• Figure 2: COINS framework: a) CI process; b) Architecture of the reference implementation.
• Figure 3: Locations of available testbed devices in outdoor environment.