Emulation of Radio Access Networks to Facilitate the Development of Distributed Applications

Emulation of Radio Access Networks is a valuable tool for the development of distributed applications incorporating mobile terminals. The network simulator ns–2 provides mechanisms to route live network traffic through its simulation and thus emulate a network in real-time. However, it lacks certain core features for the emulation of networks with mobile terminals: roaming of terminals across base stations, dynamic addressing of nodes, and the export of these changes to the outside application to evaluate its capabilities in dealing with these consequences of terminal mobility. To enable this, a new set-up for emulation is proposed and implemented using ns–2. An infrastructure routing protocol (INFRA) is presented, as well as an additional TAP network object and a TAP agent that were required to unleash the full potential of the new routing protocol. The results of several experiments applying these new components expose the added value of the new emulation setup for the evaluation of distributed applications.