Data Collection and Analysis Framework for Mobile Ad Hoc Network Research

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has invested significantly in development and deployment of aerial high-capacity backbone (HCB) networks. Understanding the performance of these Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) is challenging, and requires insight into multiple layers of the protocol stack. Tons of data get generated at each layer of the stack. MIT LL has developed a data collection and visualization framework to parse through important data and help monitor and analyze the performance of these networks. The HCB data collection and analysis framework is comprised of pluggable data collection and reporting daemons, a persistent storage component based on a time-series database, and a visualization dashboard capable of displaying network performance metrics in real-time and playback modes. In this paper, we showcase the capabilities of this framework, identifying how it has helped further our research, and how it can be adapted to support other similar research programs that generate tons of data.