Open Wireless Laboratory (OWL) at Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB)

Owned by George Clapp
Last updated: Oct 02, 2019 by Tracy Van Brakle
3 min read

Introduction

The environment for 5G use case proofs-of-concept (PoCs) is the Open Wireless Laboratory (OWL) at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA.  The environment consists of interconnected servers and wireless network equipment.  One can gain access to the environment by requesting an account with WINLAB using these instructions.   There is also information at the ORBIT web page of WINLAB.  Once you are given an account, WINLAB requires the use of public key authentication to access their systems, and they provide instructions at this page.

Environment

The diagram (below) shows the current configuration.  The entry point is an Ubuntu machine console.sb10.orbit-lab.org on which you will have an account.  There are currently three Ubuntu 18.04 servers: node1-1, node2-1 and node2-2, which are managed by OpenStack (several other servers will be installed).  Node1-1 is the controller node, and node2-1 and node202 are compute nodes.  The console and three servers are connected by two networks: control (10.30.0.0/16) and data (10.31.0.0/16).  All of the physical wireless network equipment, shown in the far right of the diagram, will be connected to the data network.  The 10.50.30.0/16 network on the left provides access from the greater Internet, and the network 10.1.110.0/16 is internal and used for out-of-band interfaces to the machines.  These latter two networks are of less interest for the proof-of-concept.  All machines and VMs created in the servers have outbound access to the greater Internet via the sw-rt1-top machine shown on the bottom with a NAT and firewall.

OpenStack

We use OpenStack (Rocky version) to manage the servers.  Please contact George Clapp to obtain an OpenStack account to create and manage VMs that you need for the proof-of-concept.  We have installed ONAP using the OOM Rancher/Kubernetes instructions into five VMs shown below.

Access using ssh tunnels

Team members will want to access the OpenStack Horizon dashboard, the Rancher GUI, and their VMs.  Because these resources are on private networks, the only means of access is a ssh tunnel through console.sb10.orbit-lab.org.  The following are example commands that create these tunnels.  If others can provide more efficient methods of creating the tunnels, please share them by editing this page.  Please connect through node2-1 rather than node1-1 because node1-1 is the OpenStack controller and is underpowered.  We will remedy this when the new servers arrive.  Please contact me for the credentials for servers node1-1, node2-1 and node2-2.

To access the OpenStack Horizon dashboard

This command opens a tunnel from one's local machine to the dashboard.

\ ssh -A -t <username>@node1-1 -L 8585:localhost:80

The dashboard is listening on port 80, and this command creates a ssh tunnel that listens on port 8585, which is a random high number port, on one's local machine and relays through the console to appear at port 80 on node1-1.  Team members can then access the dashboard by opening a browser on their local machine and navigating to http://localhost:8585/horizon/auth/login.  Before executing the command, though, team members should install their public keys in each machine in the tunnel in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

To access the Rancher GUI

You can access the Rancher GUI by opening a tunnel with this command.

ssh -A -t <username>@console.sb10.orbit-lab.org -L 9999:localhost:9999 \ ssh -A -t <username>@node2-1 -L 9999:localhost:9999 \ ssh -A -t <username>@<ip-address-of-sb4-rancher> -L 9999:localhost:8080

Point a browser on your local machine at http://localhost:9999/env/1a7/infra/stack to view the GUI.  As before, 9999 is a random high number port, and public keys should be installed in each machine in the tunnel.