Large Scale Experiments of Multihop Networks in Mobile Scenarios

Abstract

This paper presents the latest advances in our research work focused on VIRMANEL and SILUMOD, a couple of tools developed for research in wireless mobile multihop networks. SILUMOD is a domain specific language dedicated to the definition of mobility models. This language contains keywords and special operators that make it easy to define a mobility model and calculate the positions of a trajectory. These positions are sent to VIRMANEL, a tool that manages virtual machines corresponding to mobile nodes, emulates their movements and the resulting connections and disconnections, and displays the network evolution to the user, thanks to its graphical user interface. The virtualization approach we take here allows to run real code and to test real protocol implementations without deploying an important experimental platform. For the experimentation of a large number of virtual mobile nodes, we defined and implemented a new algorithm for the nearest neighbor search to find the nodes that are within communication range. We then carried out a considerable measurement campaign in order to evaluate the performance of this algorithm. The results show that even with an experiment using a large number of mobile nodes, our algorithm make it possible to evaluate the state of connectivity between mobile nodes within a reasonable time and number of operations.