Easy as Pi: A Network Coding Raspberry Pi Testbed

In the near future, upcoming communications and storage networks are expected to tolerate major difficulties produced by huge amounts of data being generated from the Internet of Things (IoT). For these types of networks, strategies and mechanisms based on network coding have appeared as an alternative to overcome these difficulties in a holistic manner, e.g., without sacrificing the benefit of a given network metric when improving another. There has been recurrent issues on: (i) making large-scale deployments akin to the Internet of Things; (ii) assessing and (iii) replicating the obtained results in preliminary studies. Therefore, finding testbeds that can deal with large-scale deployments and not lose historic data in order to evaluate these mechanisms are greatly needed and desirable from a research perspective. However, this can be hard to manage, not only due to the inherent costs of the hardware, but also due to maintenance challenges. In this paper, we present the required key steps to design, setup and maintain an inexpensive testbed using Raspberry Pi devices for communications and storage networks with network coding capabilities. This testbed can be utilized for any applications requiring results replicability.