A portable real-time emulator for testing multi-radio MANETs

In building a real-life mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), network emulation has been appraised as an efficient approach for testing the real implementations of routing algorithms and protocol stacks. Most existing MANET emulators can hardly support both real-time scene construction for proof-of-concept test and real-time traffic recording for performance evaluation simultaneously. They also lack the ability to emulate the multi-radio environment. This paper presents a flexible TCP/IP-based real-time MANET emulator that can be portably deployed to facilitate the development of real multi-radio MANET routing protocols. It friendly provides visual interaction of topology control and rich configuration of emulation conditions to enable a real-time and comprehensive examination of protocol implementations