Improved IP-level emulation for mobile and wireless systems

More and more applications and protocols are now running on wireless networks. Testing such applications and protocols is a real challenge as the position of the mobile terminals and environmental effects strongly affect the overall performance. Network emulation is often perceived as a good trade-off between experiments on operational wireless networks and discrete-event simulations on Opnet or ns-2. However, ensuring repeatability and realism in network emulation while taking into account mobility in a wireless environment is very difficult. This paper proposes a network emulation architecture based on off-line computations preceding online pattern-based traffic shaping. The underlying concepts of repeatability, dynamicity and accuracy are defined in the emulation context. Three different simple case studies illustrate the validity of our approach with respect to these concepts