Studying Real-time Traffic in Multi-hop Networks Using the EMANE Emulator: Capabilities and Limitations

摘要

In this paper, we study the fidelity of an open-source software emulator to provide reliable estimation of performance forreal-time traffic in mobile ad-hoc networks. We emulate the IEEE 802.11 MAC/PHY (DCF) using the EMANE softwareemulator deployed on a cluster and run experiments for different multi-hop wireless scenarios with the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR)protocol. As an instance of real-world usage scenario, we study the performance of real-time streaming mediaover a mesh network supported by OLSR. In particular, we study the effect of mobility and background traffic oncarried load, delay and jitter. As another application, we analyze the impact of the wireless network on theself-similarity of aggregate traffic. Using traffic source models with high variability, we show that the aggregatetraffic in the wireless network is self-similar and hence preserves its burstiness at larger time scales. The results areconsistent with those obtained from high-fidelity simulation within some limitations of the emulator.