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With the growing availability of wireless networking environments,
the need for advanced methods in performance analysis of wireless
network protocols and applications has become more and more
important.
Due to the many new effects introduced by mobility and wireless
network characteristics, such as limited transmission range, dynamic
topology, unreliable links and relatively low bandwidth compared to
wired networks, protocols and applications must be developed which
are able to effciently perform under these dynamic conditions.
In general, the real system in which the applications will be
deployed is not available to the performance analyst, and
alternatives are required that mimic the real system as precisely as
possible in a laboratory scale environment.
One promising way to perform protocol and application evaluation is
the method of emulation, which allows to execute applications and
protocols in their original implementation, on top of a testbed
infrastructure providing a virtual environment that is a
comprehensive model of the original system.
In this thesis, we will develop new concepts concerning the
emulation of mobile and ad hoc networks. We will investigate the
different approaches that are candidates for a concrete realization,
and chose an appropriate solution that will support the emulation of
the physical and medium access layer of a wireless network protocol
stack.
We provide the implementation of a prototype system which integrates
the developed concepts and supports the emulation of mobile and ad
hoc scenarios. Based on the prototype, we will show that we are able
to analyze any protocol and application which resides above the MAC
layer of the testbed system, by use of a concrete ad hoc routing
protocol implementation.
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