Network Emulation for Application Development in Heterogeneous Networks

This paper describes an emulation based approach to develop and test future applications and services in Ad-hoc and heterogeneous network environments. For the development of applications and services in Ad-hoc and heterogeneous networks it is important to consider the characteristics of each network type. This is contrary to the traditional goal of network stacks and middleware solutions which indeed want to hide network characteristics from the application developer. The setup of a development environment for such type of applications is complex and costly, and the development quite laborious. To ease the development of applications, services, and platforms we propose an emulation based approach. We present a prototype for such an emulation environment and illustrate the setup on a concrete example, the setup for the Virtual City Portal prototype. For the Virtual City Portal we employ digital broadcast networks, cell phone networks, and Ad-hoc networks.