A Linux-based EGPRS real-time test bed software for wireless QoS and differentiated service studies

A Linux-based EGPRS (enhanced General Packet Radio Service) real-time test bed software is presented. It uses a Markov model to emulate the time-varying EDGE radio channel characteristics in real time, where the model parameters are obtained from intensive large-scale system simulations. The test bed is designed as a platform to test/evaluate wireless QoS scheduling algorithms for the EGPRS radio access network as well as for the EGPRS core network. It is implemented in the TCP/IP stack of the Linux operating system. The EDGE radio channel emulation, radio-aware packet scheduling algorithms, and radio resource management methods are implemented in a virtual network device driver as an intermediate layer between the IP layer and the physical Ethernet card driver, while packet scheduling algorithms for the EGPRS core network can be accommodated in the IP layer as regular QoS routing modules. Using a Web-based test bed controller, one can set up radio system configuration and PDP context parameters for the test bed, and monitor traffic statistics such as instantaneous transmission rate, instantaneous and accumulated queue length, accumulated queue length norm, and accumulated number of transmitted and retransmitted bytes. Some experimental results are given to demonstrate the use of the test bed.