CARMEN: a cognitive networking testbed on android OS devices

Wireless devices running the Android operating system offer a novel opportunity to study network behaviors, and to observe and modify, in real time, key networking parameters. This opens up an unprecedented opportunity to study, test, and evaluate the performance of techniques operating at different layers of the protocol stack and adopting the cognitive networking paradigm. In this article, we describe our novel IEEE 802.11 mesh network testbed that integrates Android-based devices. The aim is to build a flexible testbed to observe in-stack and out-of-stack parameters of interest that, with some modifications, can be used to test networking techniques in both civilian and emergency scenarios. We provide the implementation details to create an ad hoc network among these inexpensive commercial devices, and specify how to observe and modify the networking parameters at different layers of the protocol stack. We also run some standard protocols on the network, and we obtain some repeatable results, which are similar to other results from the literature and confirm our testbed as a valid tool for ad hoc network performance evaluation.