Drift: A Highly Condensed Emulation Framework for Mobile Nodes in Server Clusters

Prototyping application-layer algorithms in wireless networks is a lengthy and challenging process, involving either programming within a specific simulation platform, or deploying a real testbed that is neither flexible nor scalable. In this paper, the authors present Drift, a high-performance wireless emulation testbed that takes advantage of the benefits of both simulation and real implementation, while trying to avoid their drawbacks. As a highly condensed emulation infrastructure, Drift makes it possible to rapidly develop and validate large-scale wireless network application-layer protocols within a cluster computing environment. Unlike existing emulation testbeds, Drift features a fully decentralized architecture, an efficient message processing unit, and more accurate network models for mobile wireless nodes.