A testbed to support Radio-to-Router interface testing and evaluation

In highly dynamic airborne and wireless environments, per link information becomes crucial in effectively routing packets throughout the network and preserving application QoS. In recent years, a number of radio-to-router protocols such as Point-to-Point over Ethernet RFC5578¹, Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP), and Radio-to-Router Control Protocol (R2CP) have emerged to provide per link information from radio-to-router to help make more informed routing decisions on highly dynamic links operating at various data rates and to possibly provide flow control. In addition, integrating and testing radio-to-router protocols with both unicast and multicast routing protocols designed to operate in MANET environments provides fundamental insights into the their performance and real-world utility. To effectively evaluate each of the Radio-to-Router protocols and understand some of the practical implementation issues, a flexible testbed supporting multiple emulated DoD radios and their link characteristics, as well as multiple open source and commercial routers that support radio-aware routing is needed. In this paper, we present a 6-node testbed that supports emulation of several directional, electronic switch-beam, and omnidirectional radio technologies as well as routing technologies to help automate evaluation and testing of RFC5578, DLEP, and R2CP. Specifically, we describe the system setup, some challenges with supporting current DoD radio technologies and temporary solutions, and provide some examples of results and data derived from multiple runs on the emulation network.²