Two-stage wireless network emulation

Testing and deploying mobile wireless networks and applications are very challenging tasks, due to the network size and administration as well as node mobility management. Well known simulation tools provide a more flexible environment but they do not run in real time and they rely on models of the developed system rather than on the system itself. Emulation is a hybrid approach allowing real application and traffic to be run over a simulated network, at the expense of accuracy when the number of nodes is too important. In this paper, emulation is split in two stages : first, the simulation of network conditions is precomputed so that it does not undergo real-time constraints that decrease its accuracy ; second, real applications and traffic are run on an emulation platform where the precomputed events are scheduled in soft real-time. This allows the use of accurate models for node mobility, radio signal propagation and communication stacks. An example shows that a simple situation can be simply tested with real applications and traffic while relying on accurate models. The consistency between the simulation results and the emulated conditions is also illustrated

Energy Efficient and Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks - An Extension to IEEE 802.15.4e

Collecting sensor data in industrial environments from up to some tenth of battery powered sensor nodes with sampling rates up to 100Hz requires energy aware protocols, which avoid collisions and long listening phases. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard focuses on energy aware wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Task Group 4e has published an amendment to fulfill up to 100 sensor value transmissions per second per sensor node (Low Latency Deterministic Network (LLDN) mode) to satisfy demands of factory automation. To improve the reliability of the data collection in the star topology of the LLDN mode, we propose a relay strategy, which can be performed within the LLDN schedule. Furthermore we propose an extension of the star topology to collect data from two-hop sensor nodes. The proposed Retransmission Mode enables power savings in the sensor node of more than 33%, while reducing the packet loss by up to 50%. To reach this performance, an optimum spatial distribution is necessary, which is discussed in detail

W-NINE: a two-stage emulation platform for mobile and wireless systems

More and more applications and protocols are now running on wireless networks. Testing the implementation of such applications and protocols is a real challenge as the position of the mobile terminals and environmental effects strongly affect the overall performance. Network emulation is often perceived as a good trade-off between experiments on operational wireless networks and discrete-event simulations on Opnet or ns-2. However, ensuring repeatability and realism in network emulation while taking into account mobility in a wireless environment is very difficult. This paper proposes a network emulation platform, called W-NINE, based on off-line computations preceding online pattern-based traffic shaping. The underlying concepts of repeatability, dynamicity, accuracy and realism are defined in the emulation context. Two different simple case studies illustrate the validity of our approach with respect to these concepts

An Accurate and Efficient Analysis of a MBSFN Network

A new accurate analysis is presented for an OFDM-based multicast-broadcast single-frequency network (MBSFN). The topology of the network is modeled by a constrained random spatial model involving a fixed number of base stations placed over a finite area with a minimum separation. The analysis is driven by a new closed-form expression for the conditional outage probability at each location of the network, where the conditioning is with respect to the network realization. The analysis accounts for the diversity combining of signals transmitted by different base stations of a given MBSFN area, and also accounts for the interference caused by the base stations of other MBSFN areas. The analysis features a flexible channel model, accounting for path loss, Nakagami fading, and correlated shadowing. The analysis is used to investigate the influence of the minimum base-station separation and provides insight regarding the optimal size of the MBSFN areas. In order to highlight the percentage of the network that will fail to successfully receive the broadcast, the area below an outage threshold (ABOT) is here used and defined as the fraction of the network that provides an outage probability (averaged over the fading) that meets a threshold.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2014, to appea