GENI Site Installation

Typical site GENI 4G wireless deployment is shown in Figure 1. The hardware setup establishes the wiring layout and switching requirements for nodes and the console. The nodes can be easily distinguished from the console by the number of Ethernet ports they have. Consoles require 4 ports while nodes have only 3. The console node acts as an authenticated gateway that only allows registered authenticated users to login to client node resources. The different networks are:

• CM network - admin management of nodes, power cycle them remotely
• Control - experimenters issue commands over this network
• Data - actual interface that allows client nodes and the WiMAX BS to send data to nodes and/or resources in GENI

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In the figure, the data network can either reach the public internet via the Console gateway or resources in GENI via Layer 2 VLANs.

Possible Network switch configurations for different networks

The 3 networks can be setup in different ways. The three recommended ways for GENI sites are as follows:

• Single managed switch with different networks setup for all nodes via trunk VLANs for the entire campus path.
• Single managed switch per network setup via access VLANs for the entire campus path.
• Single managed switch per node with all networks trunked on a single upstream campus switch

The site software installation process has three major phases. All of the software setup is done on the console since the nodes have their operating system pushed onto them via the OMF imaging infrastructure that we are going to build on the console.

To setup the console software, we have to install a base operating system (based on Ubuntu 12.04), install and configure the omf services and test the deployment. The services that need to be configured are: DNS/DHCP, LDAP, xmpp and a range of OMF Aggregate Managers: Inventory, Account Management, CMC, etc.

Once these services are properly function, the GENI site is ready to be used for experiments.