AEROMAN: A Novel Architecture to Evaluate Routing Protocols for Multi-Hop Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper, we present AEROMAN (Architecture to Evaluate Routing Protocols for Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks) which is designed and implemented for evaluation of routing protocols for multi-hop wireless networks. AEROMAN uses QOMET, a wireless link emulation tool, to compute parameters of wireless links, such as bandwidth, delay, packet loss rate, in contention-free conditions. In order to take into account the properties of contention-based media access for wireless channel, AEROMAN uses an Adaptive Traffic (AT) model to emulate the sharing feature of CSMA/CA mechanism in IEEE 802.11. The evaluations show that the AEROMAN with AT model effectively captures the characteristics of wireless communications. Several experiments using OLSR as routing protocol with different routing metrics are performed in order to illustrate the main features and usability of AEROMAN.