• Publisher-DOI

Experimental validation of novel network solutions, protocols, and applications gains increasing importance. The complexity of today's network systems makes evaluations in physical testbeds mandatory to capture real-world effects. However, this causes methodological and technical issues and challenges researchers in handling their agile testbed deployments. In contrast to Internet-scale testbeds, most agile experiments require specific topologies, specialized hardware, or a custom environment. They typically run only a few times and demand live user interaction. Existing management systems for Internet-scale testbeds do not accommodate these needs due to their complexity and maintenance overhead. In this paper, we present TPy, a lightweight and flexible framework to conduct distributed network experiments. TPy is written in Python and extendable via modules. To demonstrate its versatility and ease-of-use, we use TPy to perform experiments in the domains of millimeter-wave and secure multi-hop communications. We share TPy as open source software to support the community of experimental evaluation.