+### Cite this work
+
+If you use the emulation platform for your research and/or other publications, please cite the following paper to reference our work:
+
+* M. Peuster, H. Karl, and S. v. Rossem: [MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7919490/). IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Palo Alto, CA, USA, pp. 148-153. doi: 10.1109/NFV-SDN.2016.7919490. (2016)
+
+## Installation
+
+There are multiple ways to install and use the emulation platform. The easiest way is the automated installation using the OSM installer. The bare-metal installation requires a freshly installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and is done by an ansible playbook. Another option is to use a nested Docker environment to run the emulator inside a Docker container.
+
+### Automated installation (recommended)
+
+```sh
+./install_osm.sh --lxdimages --vimemu
+```
+
+This command will install OSM (as LXC containers) as well as the emulator (as a Docker container) on a local machine. It is recommended to use a machine with Ubuntu 16.04.
+
+### Manual installation
+
+#### Option 1: Bare-metal installation
+
+```sh
+sudo apt-get install ansible git aptitude
+```
+
+##### Step 1. Containernet installation
+
+```sh
+cd
+git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git
+cd ~/containernet/ansible
+sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml
+```
+
+##### Step 2. vim-emu installation
+
+```sh
+cd
+git clone https://osm.etsi.org/gerrit/osm/vim-emu.git
+cd ~/vim-emu/ansible
+sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml
+```
+
+#### Option 2: Nested Docker Deployment
+This option requires a Docker installation on the host machine on which the emulator should be deployed.
+
+```sh
+git clone https://osm.etsi.org/gerrit/osm/vim-emu.git</code>
+cd ~/vim-emu</code>
+# build the container:
+docker build -t vim-emu-img .
+# run the (interactive) container:
+docker run --name vim-emu -it --rm --privileged --pid='host' -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock vim-emu-img /bin/bash
+```
+
+
+## Usage
+
+### Example
+
+This simple example shows how to start the emulator with a simple topology (terminal 1) and how to start (terminal 2) some empty VNF containers in the emulated datacenters (PoPs) by using the vim-emu CLI.
+
+* First terminal (start the emulation platform):
+ * `sudo python examples/default_single_dc_topology.py`
+* Second terminal (use `docker exec vim-emu <command>` for nested Docker deployment):
+ * `vim-emu compute start -d dc1 -n vnf1`
+ * `vim-emu compute start -d dc1 -n vnf2`
+ * `vim-emu compute list`