The NETMODE testbed of the National Technical University of Athens is an Edge Computing-enabled testbed, which aims to provide computing, wireless, and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure components to facilitate the deployment and evaluation of modern smart applications and use cases. The NETMODE testbed provides the experimenters with mobile robots, equipped with various sensors, for conducting smart manufacturing experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments. Therefore, by offering heterogeneous computing, network resources, mobile robots, and IoT one can orchestrate a cyber-physical system and experiment with smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 scenarios.
In detail, the NETMODE testbed provides a small-sized edge datacenter, various types of wireless nodes, environmental sensors, Raspberry Pi devices, and indoor/outdoor mobile robots. The computing infrastructure is composed of a cluster of heterogeneous servers (i.e., HPE DL Proliant 360 Gen10), desktop machines (GPU-enabled), and low-power devices (e.g., Raspberry Pis) that can host virtualized applications or microservices. The NETMODE testbed is connected to the rest testbeds of Fed4FIRE (https://www.fed4fire.eu/) through a high-speed optical fiber network, that allows users to deploy multi-domain network architectures minimizing the transmission overhead. The outdoor area of the testbed is covered by wireless nodes (i.e., MikroTik NetMetal ac2 ) that are connected to the computing infrastructure of the testbed offering the latest communication protocols e.g., 802.11a/n/c. Therefore experiments considering various topics of wireless communications (e.g., users’ interference, mobility, and migration) are possible. NETMODE has also available tools and computational resources for extensive large-scale simulation and validation for resource allocation in virtualized environments. Finally, the available mobile robots (i.e., Turtlebot2, Turtlebot3, Actobotics Kit – Nomad 4WD Off-Road) communicate with the rest of the testbed’s components through a WiFi connection, while 4G/LTE communication is also supported. The robots’ movements are controlled by onboard Raspberry Pi devices which are also equipped with high-resolution cameras, LiDAR sensors, and various motion sensors. This allows realizing autonomous vehicle scenarios or remote operation in a real 5G-enabled infrastructure.