MiNT: a miniaturized network testbed for mobile wireless research

Most mobile wireless networking research today relies on simulations. However, fidelity of simulation results has always been a concern, especially when the protocols being studied are affected by the propagation and interference characteristics of the radio channels. Inherent difficulty in faithfully modeling the wireless channel characteristics has encouraged several researchers to build wireless network testbeds. A full-fledged wireless testbed is spread over a large physical space because of the wide coverage area of radio signals. This makes a large-scale testbed difficult and expensive to set up, configure, and manage. This paper describes a miniaturized 802.11b-based, multi-hop wireless network testbed called MiNT. MiNT occupies a significantly small space, and dramatically reduces the efforts required in setting up a multi-hop wireless network used for wireless application/protocol testing and evaluation. MiNT is also a hybrid simulation platform that can execute ns-2 simulation scripts with the link, MAC and physical layer in the simulator replaced by real hardware. We demonstrate the fidelity of MiNT by comparing experimental results on it with similar experiments conducted on a non-miniaturized testbed. We also compare the results of experiments conducted using hybrid simulation on MiNT with those obtained using pure simulation. Finally, using a case study we show the usefulness of MiNT in wireless application testing and evaluation.