A large-scale testbed for reproducible ad hoc protocol evaluations

We have built an ad hoc protocol evaluation testbed (APE) in order to perform large-scale, reproducible experiments. APE aims at assessing several different routing protocols in a real-world environment instead of by simulation. We present the APE testbed architecture and report on initial experiments with up to 37 physical nodes that show the reproducibility and scalability of our approach. Several scenario scripts have been written that include strict choreographic instructions to the testers who walk around with ORiNOCO equipped laptops. We introduce a mobility metric called virtual mobility that we use to compare different test runs. This metric is based on the measured signal quality instead of the geometric distance between nodes, hence it reflects how a routing protocol actually perceives the network's dynamics.