Brian White, Jay Lepreau, Shashi Guruprasad
October 2002
Flux Research Group
School of Computing, University of Utah
50 S. Central Campus Drive Rm. 3190
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9205 USA
The success of ns highlights the importance of an infrastructure that enables efficient experimentation. Similarly, Netbed's automatic configuration and control of emulated and live network environments minimizes the effort spent configuring and running experiments. Learning from the evolution of these systems, in this paper we argue that a live wireless and mobile experimental facility focusing on ease of use and accessibility will not only greatly lower the barrier to research in these areas, but that the primary technical challenges can be overcome.
The flexibility of Netbed's common abstractions for diverse node and link types has enabled its development from strictly an emulation platform to one that integrates simulation and live network experimentation. It can be further extended to incorporate wireless and mobile devices. To reduce the tedium of wireless and mobile experimentation, we propose automatically allocating and mapping a subset of a dense mesh of devices to match a specified network topology. To achieve low-overhead, coarse repeatability for mobile experiments, we outline how to leverage the predictability of passive couriers, such as PDA-equipped students and PC-equipped busses.
Full paper appeared in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-I), October 2002:
The slides from the Hotnets talk are available as: