Designing and implementing of a wireless network emulator

Network simulators produce a network environment for studying and analyzing network protocols and services. But this kind of network environment is based on simulating network traffic and action, which is different from the real networks. Emulators can provide researchers a more accurate and authentic network environment on production network in a lab setting. There has no general purpose and widely used wireless network emulator nowadays. In this paper, we design and implement a wireless network emulation environment, which is built based on NIST Net package and added a wireless mobility function. It runs on Linux industry PCs with wireless network cards. It can provide users many facilities, such as controlling network conditions, configuration routing table and so on. Our experiments show the performance of MSR protocol on this test bed.