On the topological repeatability of experiments with wireless multihop networks

ABSTRACT

Repeatability has most often been neglected in experiments with wireless multihop networks. In this paper, we propose to consider repeatability in a coarse-grained fashion on a topological level. For this, a metric for comparing the similarity of topologies in static and mobile setups is presented and used to examine the level of repeatability achievable in such experiments. This metric is able to classify experiments according to the presence or absence of interference and to changes in the behavior of mobile nodes. It can be used to identify experimental runs where application layer performance is influenced by topological effects.

REFERENCES

• 1: Daniel Aguayo , John Bicket , Sanjit Biswas , Glenn Judd , Robert Morris, Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.34 n.4, October 2004
• 2: E. Borgia , M. Conti , F. Delmastro , E. Gregori, Experimental comparison of routing and middleware solutions for mobile ad hoc networks: legacy vs cross-layer approach, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Experimental approaches to wireless network design and analysis, August 22-22, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA [doi>10.1145/1080148.1080166]
• 3: Sachin Ganu , Haris Kremo , Richard Howard , Ivan Seskar, Addressing Repeatability in Wireless Experiments using ORBIT Testbed, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the DEvelopment of NeTworks and COMmunities, p.153-160, February 23-25, 2005 [doi>10.1109/TRIDNT.2005.9]
• 4: Robert S. Gray , David Kotz , Calvin Newport , Nikita Dubrovsky , Aaron Fiske , Jason Liu , Christopher Masone , Susan McGrath , Yougu Yuan, Outdoor experimental comparison of four ad hoc routing algorithms, Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, October 04-06, 2004, Venice, Italy [doi>10.1145/1023663.1023703]
• 5: W. Kiess, T. Ogilvie, and M. Mauve. The EXC Toolkit for Real-World Experiments with Wireless Multihop Networks. In EXPONWIRELESS '08, June 2008.
• 6: H. Lundgren, D. Lundberg, J. Nielsen, E. Nordström, and C. Tschudin. A large-scale testbed for reproducible ad hoc protocol evaluations. In WCNC '02, Mar. 2002.
• 7: P. Showbridge, M. Kraetzl, and D. Ray. Detection of abnormal change in dynamic networks. In IDC '99, Feb. 1999.
• 8: B. N. Taylor and C. E. Kuyatt. Guidelines for evaluating and expressing the uncertainty of NIST measurement results. Technical Note 1297, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 1994.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
comparability, experiment similarity, experiments