Device driver-enabled wireless network emulation

Testing and evaluating the performance of actual software for wireless networks is difficult. Real-world wireless testbeds are costly and cumbersome to maintain. Measurement studies are complicated by many uncontrollable environmental influences, particularly the wireless channel. Network simulations on the contrary allow the convenient analysis of wireless networks with a maximum level of controllability; however they typically do not allow the execution of arbitrary and unmodified wireless communication software inside the simulation environment. In this paper, we present a new network emulation architecture for the evaluation of wireless communication software. By bridging the gap between simulation and wireless software using a custom device driver, our framework enables arbitrary and unmodified wireless communication software to be evaluated in a fully simulated network. In accordance to this architecture we present a new 802.11 emulation framework based on ns-3 that allows the investigation of arbitrary Wi-Fi software for Linux. It eases both the development and the performance analysis of present and future Wi-Fi software.