WiFu: A composable toolkit for experimental wireless transport protocols

Extensive research has been performed on improving TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks, but there have been relatively few experimental evaluations of this work. To make it easier to conduct research in this area, we are releasing WiFu, an open-source toolkit for developing experimental wireless transport protocols. WiFu provides for user-space development of reliable transport and rate control algorithms, greatly simplifying the implementation effort required. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the WiFu toolkit, which decomposes transport protocols into smaller components that enable rapid, plug-and-play development of new variants. We present experiments to demonstrate that the performance of WiFu compares favorably to the Linux kernel for wireless networks. We illustrate the utility of WiFu by using it to conduct experiments with several wireless transport protocols, and show that the performance of some protocols differs significantly from previously reported results.