Pharos: An Application-Oriented Testbed for Heterogeneous Wireless Networking Environments

This paper presents the Pharos mobile computing testbed which focuses on application-driven validation of pervasive computing research using real hardware and real mobility. Pharos enables meaningful and reproducible validation at all levels of the network stack, including mobility modeling, routing protocols, coordination, application support, and system configuration. At the same time, the testbed maintains links with software simulation to facilitate the development of meaningful models to reflect actual physical network behaviors and constraints. Such an applicationoriented mobile testbed is critically important to bridge the disconnect between theoretical or statistical modeling and practical evaluation.