Emulation of Fading Wireless Link Effects in NEWS Wired Testbed

Currently, under development by the Boeing Company, Network Emulator Wireless Simulator (NEWS) is a wired testbed for evaluating the performance of MANET protocols. In part, NEWS extends the Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Emulator (MANE) originally developed by Navy Research Lab (NRL). In this paper, the authors report the addition of emulation functionality to the NEWS testbed capturing fading wireless link effects. In order to emulate wireless link effects, they develop a finite-state discrete-time Markov chain the parameters of which are extracted from the fading, shadowing, transmission power, modulation type, and antenna configuration characteristics of the underlying link.