libARA: A framework for simulation and testbed based studies on ant routing algorithms in wireless multi-hop networks

Routing in wireless multi-hop networks has been an active area of research over the last decade. Although, many testbeds were setup recently, the knowledge about the dynamic behavior of routing algorithms and the performance evaluation were mainly done via simulation. Simulation studies are imperative to understand important aspects of the algorithms, but are limited in certain aspects of the physical environment. Therefore, it is necessary to study routing algorithms also in a more realistic environment, in a testbed. Unfortunately, studying algorithms both in simulation and testbed raises multiple challenges. Particularly, the code base of the routing algorithm differ in both environments, which may lead to different behavior of the same routing algorithm. In this paper we introduce libARA, a framework that supports simulation and testbed experiments to study ant routing algorithms on the very same code base. Thus, the logic of the routing algorithm is the same, but works on two different environments. This is important to keep the results from both environments comparable and thus to increase the insight into the behavior of the algorithm. The main goal of the framework is to investigate the scalability and adaptability of ant routing algorithms.