|
MiNT-2: A Miniaturized Robotic Platform for Wireless Protocol Development, Testing, and Debugging.
The proliferation of wireless-enabled portable computing devices has spurred a growing need for efficient and powerful networking protocols. The most significant challenge in the development of robust wireless networking protocols is often the need to prototype and test these protocols in a small-scale testbed before they can be widely deployed. Two contrasting prototyping and testing methods are currently used, requiring a choice between convenience and accuracy. The first involves simulating a wireless network solely in software, but fails to accurately account for real-world factors such as realistic radio propagation models and their interaction with node mobility and obstacles. The second relies on setting up a large-scale physical testbed that, although accurate, represents a single design point and tends to be expensive to reconfigure and manage.
The MiNT project at Stony Brook University?was one of the first to propose an accurate and inexpensive small-scale physical testbed built using commercially-available robots coupled with a version of NS2 built to work cooperatively on multiple nodes. MiNT combines the best features of the two popular performance evaluation methods, achieving network accuracy comparable to that of large-scale physical testbeds without abandoning the convenience and flexibility of software simulation.
The goal of this project is to develop MiNT-2, the next generation of miniaturized multi-hop wireless testbed. MiNT-2 represents a fresh redesign of MiNT that at once simplifies and improves the original design, and extends it with a range of new features. These improvements include a new and simplified node design, improved node localization approach using RFIDs, position calibration and layout configuration. The testbed is being developed in a joint project with the Stony Brook University. The focus of our current work is to develop a fault injection and analysis and a comprehensive MAC-layer emulation capability. Automated fault injection and analysis, and MAC-level emulation, combined with the ability to quickly set up any desired network configuration and to provide visual feedback at run time, can significantly reduce the wireless application testing and development effort.
|
