Mobility Emulator for DTN and MANET Applications

Repeatable experiments to study the performance or behavior of wireless mobile adhoc network (MANET) systems such as a delay (or disruption) tolerant network (DTN) are challenging tasks. One approach to do this is to build a realistic mobile testbed, on which the mobile devices and test applications or network protocols can be deployed. This testbed approach, however, often results in expensive management and setup costs. Therefore, most of algorithms and applications considering device mobility as a critical parameter have been tested using trace-based analysis and computer simulations. However, these evaluation methods are not sufficient to reflect various natures of mobile wireless networks. This paper presents the design and implementation of an On/Off-based mobility emulation method, which virtually migrates applications over a static-grid testbed to mimic the device mobility. This emulation method assists DTN and MANET developers to evaluate their work in repeatable ways on the lab-scale static-grid testbed. Through extensive experimental analysis and a case study using two different testbeds, we show that the proposed emulation method can successfully recreate important characteristics of mobility trace data, such as contact and inter-contact time distributions