A Full Scale Wireless Ad Hoc Network Test Bed

This paper describes a wireless mobile ad hoc network test bed developed at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The test bed is a framework on which one can run any ad hoc routing protocol implementation and collect performance statistics using benchmark tests. The results are reproducible and the performance statistics collected can be analyzed at a minute level. The test bed closes the gap between simulation and real life implementation and allows performance comparison of different ad hoc routing protocols on a common platform. In this paper we enumerate the design choices for the testbed and highlight its effectiveness by presenting an evaluation of the Dynamic Source Routing(DSR) protocol on the testbed .