Step 8: Submit Experiment for Testbed Execution
During the development process, you can perform interactive operations - a typical example is starting the Experiment run (kicking off the various processes at each AVN in your Experiment), another is stopping the Experiment run when you are satisfied that the purpose of the run has been fulfilled. More sophisticated examples include performing coordinated actions to facilitate study of some phenomenon ("... thirty seconds into the run, start a heavy traffic flow from Node 1 to Node 2...", or similar). However, recall that AERPAW is a batch-mode facility, and therefore during testbed execution you will not have this backdoor access to the AERPAW Nodes. Any such action, including starting and stopping the run, must be scripted for automatic execution, before submitting the Experiment for Testbed execution.
This capability is provided by an AERPAW system called the Operator's Experiment Oversight (OEO) system. Details of how to use the OEO system is described in Section 5, together with the rest of the Experiment software environment.
Again, the Sample Experiments provide examples of how to choreograph your Experiment execution completely from the provided bootstrap execution points at each AVN.
To facilitate your building in such Experiment execution coordination in your code, the XM interface at each AERPAW Node maintains the same IP address in the Testbed Environment as they had in the Virtual Environment, so you can code Experiment management/control messages to go back and forth between AVNs depending on these addresses.
After you are satisfied that your Experiment code will do what it is intended to do when it is kicked off on the Testbed, log out of all AVNs, and use the "Save and Exit" feature from the Portal.
Section 4.7.4 provides walkthrough of the Portal interactions to "Save and Exit" an Experiment.
As with the "Save", this operation will likely take 20 - 30 minutes, or more.
After the "Save and Exit" process completes in the back-end, the status of your Experiment will again show as "Saved" on the Portal.
At this time, you can submit it for Testbed Execution.
Section 4.7.4 walks through the Portal actions to submit an Experiment to the Testbed.
Step 9 to Step 14 are now performed by AERPAW Ops/Portal/Control
At this point, the Experiment will be scheduled for Testbed Execution, and eventually executed on the Testbed, by AERPAW Ops. This can take several days or even weeks, depending on the number of Experiments currently contending for Testbed time, the availability of Ops and Safety Pilot personnel, and other factors affecting execution such as weather (especially for UAV related experiments). Over this period, you should get several emails informing you of your Experiment being queued for scheduling, being scheduled/re-scheduled, and executed in the testbed. However, you can also check the status of the Experiment in the Portal at any time, or get in touch with AERPAW Operations if you have questions or doubts.