FANTASY: Fully automatic network emulation architecture with cross-layer support

Abstract

Testing and evaluating real-world wireless and mobile systems is very difficult. The volatile nature of the wireless medium and mobility complicates their evaluation. The access to system information hindered by the operating system further increases the evaluation of a real-world system. In contrast, a simulator allows to easily set up complex wireless and mobile scenarios, log protocol variables of interest and to repeat the whole test easily if desired. Developers of real-world systems also want to perform tests with the simplicity and convenience of a simulation without loosing the ability to execute arbitrary networking software in its genuine environment (an operating system). In this paper, we present fantasy, a new network emulation architecture that allows the fully automated setup and execution of an experiment, enables the convenient access to system information and the collection of test results. With the integration of the cross-layer architecture crawler, we demonstrate that we are able to monitor parameters across protocol layers and to evaluate network emulation scenarios where cross-layer optimization is involved.