Large scale over-the-air testing of Group Centric Networking

This paper presents experimental verification of the performance of Group Centric Networking (GCN), a networking protocol developed for robust and scalable communications in lossy networks where users are localized to geographic areas, such as military tactical networks. Initial simulations in NS3 showed that GCN offers high delivery with low network overhead in the presence of high packet loss and high mobility. We extend the investigation to verify GCN's performance in actual over-the-air experimentation. In the experiments, we deployed GCN on a 90-node Android phone test bed distributed across an office building, allowing us to evaluate its performance over-the-air on real-world hardware. GCN's performance is compared against multiple popular wireless routing protocols, which we also run over-the-air. These tests yield two notable results: (1) the seemingly benign environment of an office is in fact quite lossy, with high packet error rates between users that are geographically close to one another, and (2) that GCN does indeed offer high delivery with low network overhead, which is in contrast to traditional wireless routing schemes that offer either high delivery or low overhead, or sometimes neither.