Testing large scale streaming Internet applications over wireless LANs

The amount of real-time traffic over the Internet as well as most corporate, government and academic IP networks is growing. Streaming applications are moving from purely entertainment to being essential for daily business and strategic operations. Examples include instructional training, telemedicine, unmanned vehicles, and remote security monitoring with both fixed and mobile cameras. At the same time we are experiencing an enormous growth in wireless connectivity to satisfy pervasive computing and operations requirements. Software testing on the other hand is now seen as a discipline capable of saving millions of dollars in software developing and maintenance costs as well as lives and other costs related to the failure of specific applications. However, software testing, streaming applications, and wireless LANs have rarely been considered together. In this paper, we bring these three issues together developing a network emulation tool to enable validation and verification of the performance requirements for large-scale video-based Internet software applications over 802.11b wireless LANs. Network emulation will allow for a greater range of normal and exception conditions to be tested in a controlled fashion than does connection to the actual Internet.