A real-time scalable and dynamical test system for MANET

In current research on mobile ad-hoc networks, test-beds are always needed. However, real test-beds are costly, and sometimes unfeasible, especially for large-scale mobile ad-hoc networks. Therefore, emulation systems are provided. Unfortunately, exiting emulation systems have obvious defects. They can hardly support scalability or real-time simultaneously, neither adding nor removing mobile node dynamically. In this paper, we propose a test system named ManTS. With distributed architecture and some novel approaches, such as direct transmittal and virtual application traffic, and others. ManTS is able to build test-beds for large-scale mobile ad-hoc networks and guarantee real-time emulation at the same time. Furthermore, IP or upper layer protocols and applications implemented on Linux can run on ManTS without any modification. And with ManTS, simulated mobile nodes can be added into and deleted from mobile ad-hoc networks freely, which is quite useable to test routing and transport protocols. In a word, ManTS is a more flexible test system, and really suitable to test IP and upper layer protocols and applications for large-scale mobile ad-hoc networks.