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Expanding DDLSim-Lab Research Infrastructure: New Testbeds, Open-Source Experiments & Research Collaborations
Published on August 17, 2026 by Kaitlyn Brishae Truby
Hello Open Source Collective community,
We are excited to share the next phase of DDLSim-Lab, our open-source research initiative focused on high-fidelity distributed systems evaluation, edge-cloud computing, networking, and cybersecurity research.
DDLSim-Lab is continuing to expand beyond software development toward a broader reproducible experimental infrastructure capable of running real-world distributed systems experiments across heterogeneous bare-metal and wireless research environments.
Our goal is to build open, reproducible infrastructure that enables researchers to evaluate distributed systems under realistic physical and wireless conditions.
Expanding Our Research Testbed Access
Following our work around the ORBIT/COSMOS research testbed ecosystem in the United States, we are now preparing the next stage of our infrastructure expansion in Europe through INRIA's R2lab wireless research testbed.
We are currently preparing an experimental plan for R2lab and pursuing access to its wireless research infrastructure. Our planned experiments will investigate distributed networking and edge-cloud systems under realistic wireless conditions, including controlled latency, jitter, packet loss, congestion, link degradation, and failure scenarios.
Where supported by the available infrastructure and policies, we are particularly interested in experimenting with Wi-Fi and cellular/4G/5G environments, together with Linux kernel networking technologies such as eBPF and XDP.
The objective is to evaluate deterministic distributed-latency routing, load balancing, fault tolerance, and resilience mechanisms across heterogeneous edge-cloud environments.
Building a Reproducible Research Infrastructure
Our long-term objective is not simply to run individual experiments, but to build an open, reproducible research environment where researchers can experiment with distributed systems under realistic infrastructure conditions without requiring access to expensive private laboratories.
DDLSim-Lab is therefore being designed around:
• Bare-metal experimentation
 • Wireless and edge-cloud environments
 • Reproducible experiment configurations
 • Automated infrastructure provisioning
 • Network emulation and controlled impairments
 • eBPF/XDP-based networking experiments
 • Hardware and network telemetry
 • Distributed systems benchmarking
 • Cybersecurity and resilience experiments
 • Open-source research workflows
Seeking Research Infrastructure Collaborations
As the project develops, we are actively looking to establish relationships with research testbeds, universities, laboratories, infrastructure providers, and technology organizations that can support reproducible systems and cybersecurity research.
We are particularly interested in access to:
• Bare-metal servers
 • Wireless research testbeds
 • Edge computing resources
 • Advanced networking infrastructure
 • GPU/CPU research resources
 • Cloud computing credits
 • Long-term experimental environments
Infrastructure support would allow us to move from small-scale demonstrations toward larger distributed experiments involving multiple physical nodes and heterogeneous network conditions.
Any infrastructure provided to the project would be used for open-source research, reproducible experimentation, and publicly documented scientific work whenever permitted by the hosting organization.
Open Science and Publication
DDLSim-Lab is committed to publishing research outputs and making software, methodologies, and experimental results publicly accessible whenever possible.
Our research publication, software, and project documentation are publicly available through the following resources:
What Comes Next
The next phase of DDLSim-Lab will focus on expanding access to research infrastructure, validating our experimental methodology on additional physical testbeds, and developing reproducible distributed experiments that can be shared with the wider research community.
We are currently exploring and applying to additional national and international research testbeds and experimental infrastructure programs to expand the environments available to DDLSim-Lab researchers.
We welcome collaboration with organizations interested in supporting open-source distributed systems, cloud-edge computing, networking, and cybersecurity research.
If your laboratory, university, testbed, or infrastructure organization is interested in collaborating with DDLSim-Lab, we would be glad to discuss potential research experiments, infrastructure access, or long-term collaboration.
DDLSim-Lab
Building open infrastructure for reproducible distributed systems research.