Network testing plays an important role in the iterative process of developing new communication protocols and algorithms. However, test environments have to keep up with the evolution of technology and require continuous update and redesign. In this article, we propose COINS, a framework that can be used by wireless technology developers to enable CI practices in their testbed infrastructure. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a reference architecture and implementation of COINS for controlled testing of multi-technology 5G MTC networks. The implementation upgrades an existing wireless experimentation testbed with new software and hardware functionalities. It blends web service technology and operating system virtualization technologies with emerging Internet of Things technologies enabling CI for wireless networks. Moreover, we also extend an existing qualitative methodology for comparing similar frameworks and identify and discuss open challenges for wider use of CI practices in wireless technology development.

The LOG-a-TEC testbed is a combined outdoor and indoor heterogeneous wireless testbed for experimentation with sensor networks and machine-type communications, which is included within the Fed4FIRE+ federation. It supports continuous deployment principles; however, it is missing an option to monitor and control the experiment in real-time, which is required for experiment execution under comparable conditions. The paper describes the implementation of the experiment control and monitoring system (EC and MS) as the upgrade of the LOG-a-TEC testbed. EC and MS is implemented within existing infrastructure management and built systems as a new service. The EC and MS is accessible as a new tab in sensor management system portal. It supports several commands, including start, stop and restart application, exit the experiment, flash or reset the target device, and displays the real-time status of the experiment application. When nodes apply Contiki-NG as their operating system, the Contiki-NG shell tool is accessible with the help of the newly developed tool, giving further experiment execution control capabilities to the user. By using the ZeroMQ concurrency framework as a message exchange system, information can be asynchronously sent to one or many devices at the same time, providing a real-time data exchange mechanism. The proposed upgrade does not disrupt any continuous deployment functionality and enables remote control and monitoring of the experiment. To evaluate the EC and MS functionality, two experiments were conducted: the first demonstrated the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) localization, while the second analysed interference avoidance in the 6TiSCH (IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e) wireless technology for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).