Virtual ad hoc network testbeds for network-aware applications

Testing and evaluation of applications over mobile ad hoc networks is a challenge due to the difficulty of conducting field experiments and regression test. The common practice today is to perform such testing in a virtual ad hoc network testbed before field experiments. Although typical emulated network testbeds can be instrumented to generate and control certain network conditions, there is a class of network-aware applications, including network management systems, that needs to interact with network elements in order to observe and control the network behavior. To support testing and evaluation of such applications, a virtual ad hoc network testbed must allow monitoring as well as runtime configuration and control of the virtual network. Moreover, such virtual network testbeds should i) present a standard-based interface, ii) streamline the testbed setup process, and iii) not require any code modification to the application under test. In this paper, we present techniques that can satisfy the above requirements for a virtual ad hoc network testbed. An SNMP interface was used to illustrate the automation of testbed setup for evaluating applications as is.