WLAN emulation on StarBED

In this paper we present the Wireless LAN (WLAN) emulator that we design to run on StarBED, the large scale network experiment environment of the Hokuriku Research Centre in Ishikawa, Japan. As WLANs start to spread on an ever wider scale, the need to investigate application deployment on WLANs has become stringent. We develop an emulation environment since it allows using in experiments the real applications that will be deployed in practice. In addition, it offers full control of the network conditions in which the applications will be tested. Our approach is user-oriented in the sense that the input of the system is a user-level scenario representation. This is subsequently converted into a quality degradation description that represents the effect the network will have on application traffic. Finally, the quality degradation description is transformed into an emulator configuration that is effectively used in the emulation environment to enforce network quality degradation on the application traffic.