A testbed for emulation of MANETs in hostile scenarios

The present work focuses on emulation and validation of protocol stacks for MANETs (mobile ad-hoc networks) that must support multimedia applications in a tactical environment. We considered a network consisting of some tens of mobile nodes, with randomly variable speeds in the order of some tens of km/h. Nodes are deployed on a scenario of a few km² and have a radio range of some hundreds of meters. Commonly used Internet-based applications (based on the TCP-IP paradigm) have to be supported; they offer a multimedia traffic and are associated with QoS requirements (e.g. bounded latency and low losses). We developed a testbed for emulation and experimental validation of such scenario with a major routing protocol in the MANET context, i.e. OLSR (optimized link-state routing).