Design and Implementation of a Testbed for Mobile Adhoc Network Protocols

Abstract

Due to the significant growth in the area of wireless communication in the last few years, Quality of Service (QoS) has become an important consideration for supporting variety of applications. Elaborate testing of newly developed Mobile Adhoc Network’s routing protocols in real world scenarios is a key step for providing QoS to the users. In order to test the developed Adhoc Routing Protocols, an IEEE 802.11 based testbed has been developed in the paper. Some well-known Adhoc network protocols were implemented and tested in user space daemon in Linux. All the key parameters necessary for assessing an Adhoc Network Protocol have been analyzed. A user application was developed in Java NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ensure repeatability and to provide a mobility model to the users in an efficient way. Customized and special purpose nodes have been developed by integrating various hardware components, in order to improve the efficiency and robustness of the testbed. Some of the well-known protocols have been tested by exposing the configured nodes to an outdoor atmosphere to cater all the unforeseen environmental factors, which affect the performance of Adhoc Protocols. Different performance metrics like overhead, throughput, end to end delay, average jitter and packet loss were evaluated by varying mobility, number of hops, packet size and pause time.