A Data Set and Reference Experiments for Multipath Wireless Emulation on Public Testbeds

As mobile devices with dual WiFi and cellular interfaces become widespread, network protocols have been developed that utilize the availability of multiple paths. To evaluate the performance of these protocols on a testbed, researchers often use link emulation with either synthetic traces or real traces from live WiFi and cellular networks. However, in a multipath scenario, the two links are not necessarily independent. The available bandwidth on the WiFi and cellular links may be negatively correlated (e.g. when moving from indoors to outdoors or vice versa) or positively correlated (e.g. when the local density of other users increases, so that both networks become more congested at the same time), and the result of an experimental evaluation of a multipath protocol will depend heavily on this relationship. Link traces of WiFi and cellular links measured at the same time, in the same place are necessary for the reproducible evaluation of multi path protocols in a testbed environment. The contributions of this work, therefore are: first ever data set of wireless link traces measured simultaneously on WiFi and cellular interfaces of a mobile device, and reference experiments for replaying these traces on emulated links on the CloudLab and FABRIC testbeds.