Emulating Ad Hoc Networks: Differences from Simulations and Emulation Specific Problems

Simulations, emulations, and test deployments play a central role in design and development of ad hoc network protocols and software. Among these three methods, emulations have gained considerable popularity. This is partly because emulations address efficiency-accuracy trade-off of simulations by incorporating real hardware or software into the synthetic environment in a controlled manner. Although generally treated as a special case of simulations, emulation experimentation have its own problems and pitfalls. These problems do not typically show up in simulation studies, since they stem from presence of real hardware or software in the experiment. In this paper, the sketch of an emulation integrated development lifecycle is presented for establishing the boundaries of emulation experiments, and the problems specific to emulations are identified and discussed.