Measurement based mobility emulation platform for next generation wireless networks

The exponential growth of the number of mobile users and their traffic generation makes mobility an intrinsic element to be considered in the design of new protocols and network architecture. In order for future Internet protocols to meet the requirements of advanced mobility services, they should be designed with mobility considerations for various signal propagation scenarios, i.e. various wireless technologies operating in different frequency bands, diverse mobility patterns in different environments ranging from vehicular mobility to pedestrian in urban and suburban scenarios. In this paper we propose “EmuWNet”, an Emulation framework for Wireless Networks, using real-world signal propagation measurements in a controlled testbed environment. This framework will enable network architecture and protocol designers to evaluate the performance of novel Internet protocols in a controlled environment for various mobility scenarios and perform fair comparisons with existing protocols for the same emulated mobility scenarios. In this paper we will demonstrate this functionality by showing how a set of signal measurement traces, whether collected from real-world experimentation or simulation can be replayed using the emulation framework. As a demonstrative example we input real-world signal strength (RSSI) traces for Wi-Fi and LTE from a smartphone into the framework and conduct mobility experiments on the ORBIT testbed, comparing a future Internet non-IP based protocol with TCP/IP based communication.