JANE - The Java Ad Hoc Network Development Environment

This work describes a Java based development platform which is intended to support ad hoc network researchers in application and protocol design. Software development within this environment is expected to follow a bottom up approach. Basic functionality is implemented in elementary components which can be combined to more complex ones by using well defined interfaces. With dynamically changing network links being rather the common case than a failure situation, asynchronous communication has been selected as the main communication paradigm within this platform. Reusability of components in different execution contexts by providing an appropriate machine abstraction is a further important design decision which drove the platform development. Code written once can be executed in a pure simulation mode, in a hybrid setting with real devices being attached to a running simulation and, finally, in a setting using real devices only. Software development following this three-tier development process paired with the platform's rich visualization features emerged to significantly ease the burden of debugging and parameterizing in such highly dynamic and inherently distributed environments. In conjunction with a core middleware platform a rich set of generic services has been implemented with the most important ones being described in this work. Several application programs have already been implemented on top of these services. These applications which are described in this work as well serve as a proof of concept for both the platform itself and the utilized set of generic service