Large Scale Experiments of Multihop Networks in Mobile Scenarios

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 key- words 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 man- ages virtual machines corresponding to mobile nodes, emu- lates their movements and the resulting connections and dis- connections, and displays the network evolution to the user, thanks to its graphical user interface. The virtualization ap- proach 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 car- ried 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.