Collaborative Research: CRI: IAD A Miniaturized Robotic Testbed for Development, Testing, and Evaluation of Protocols for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

用于无线网络的仿真工具不能准确地捕捉真实部署中无线协议的行为。另一方面，跨越大地理区域的物理测试台的部署、管理和重新配置是昂贵的。我们建议开发一个小型化的多跳无线测试平台，称为Mint，它将为协议开发，调试和测试提供一个灵活和高保真的平台，同时显着降低物理空间的要求。Mint的一个关键架构特性是使用移动的机器人来携带无线网络节点，可以通过基于串行端口的API以编程方式控制这些节点。通过以受控的方式衰减无线电信号，空间要求被“小型化”。此外，Mint还将支持自动化故障注入和分析测试，远程测试床可重新配置性和自主24x7操作。Mint测试平台将在许多研究项目中进行实验研究，例如跨层优化，最佳路由和传输调度，有效的路由成本度量，多信道网状网络的资源管理，传感器网络的节能，可扩展的基于地理的服务提供，以及移动的低功耗无线链路建模。我们的最终目标是使研究人员能够通过互联网远程访问Mint，以便在小型化环境中研究其无线协议。

Simulation tools for wireless networks do not accurately capture the behavior of wireless protocols in real-world deployments. On the other hand, physical testbeds spanning large geographic areas are expensive to deploy, manage, and reconfigure. We propose to develop a miniaturized multi-hop wireless testbed, called Mint, that will provide a flexible and high-fidelity platform for protocol development, debugging, and testing, while significantly reducing the physical space requirement. A key architectural feature of Mint is its use of mobile robots to carry wireless network nodes, which can be programmatically controlled through a serial port based API. The space requirement is "miniaturized" by attenuating the radio signals in a controlled fashion. Additionally Mint will also support automated fault injection and analysis testing, remote testbed reconfigurability, and autonomic 24x7 operation. The Mint testbed will enable experimental investigation in a number of research projects, such as, cross layer optimization, optimal routing and transmission scheduling, effective routing cost metrics, resource management for multi-channel mesh networks, energy conservation for sensor networks, scalable geographic-based service provisioning, and modeling mobile low power wireless links. Our final goal is to enable researchers to remotely access Mint over the Internet in order to investigate their wireless protocols in a miniaturized setting.